Biometric identification of listener identity from frequency following responses to speech

We investigate the biometric specificity of the frequency following response (FFR), an EEG marker of early auditory processing that reflects phase-locked activity from neural ensembles in the auditory cortex and subcortex (Chandrasekaran and Kraus 2010, Bidelman, 2015a, 2018, Coffey et al 2017b). Our objective is two-fold: demonstrate that the FFR contains information beyond stimulus properties and broad group-level markers, and to assess the practical viability of the FFR as a biometric across different sounds, auditory experiences, and recording days.

We trained the hidden Markov model (HMM) to decode listener identity from FFR spectro-temporal patterns across multiple frequency bands. Our dataset included FFRs from twenty native speakers of English or Mandarin Chinese (10 per group) listening to Mandarin Chinese tones across three EEG sessions separated by days. We decoded subject identity within the same auditory context (same tone and session) and across different stimuli and recording sessions.

The HMM decoded listeners for averaging sizes as small as one single FFR. However, model performance improved for larger averaging sizes (e.g. 25 FFRs), similarity in auditory context (same tone and day), and lack of familiarity with the sounds (i.e. native English relative to native Chinese listeners). Our results also revealed important biometric contributions from frequency bands in the cortical and subcortical EEG.

Our study provides the first deep and systematic biometric characterization of the FFR and provides the basis for biometric identification systems incorporating this neural signal.