Affective EEG-based cross-session person identification using hierarchical graph embedding

The electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is being investigated as a more confidential biometric for person identification. Despite recent advancements, a persistent challenge lies in the influence of variations in affective states. Affective states consistently exist during data collection, regardless of the protocol used. Additionally, the inherently non-stationary nature of EEG makes it susceptible to fluctuations in affective states over time. Therefore, it would be highly crucial to perform precise EEG-based person identification under varying affective states. This paper employed an integrated Multi-scale Convolution and Graph Pooling network (MCGP) to mitigate the impact of affective state variations. MCGP utilized multiple 1D convolutions at different scales to dynamically extract and fuse features. Additionally, a graph pooling layer with an attention mechanism was incorporated to generate hierarchical graph embeddings. These embeddings were concatenated as inputs for a fully connected classification layer. Experiments were conducted on the SEED and SEED-V dataset, revealing that MCGP achieved an average accuracy of 85.51% for SEED and 88.69% for SEED-V in cross-session conditions involving mixed affective states. Under single affective state cross-session scenario, MCGP achieved an average accuracy of 85.75% for SEED and 88.06% for SEED-V for the same affective states, while obtaining 79.57% for SEED and 84.52% for SEED-V for different affective states. Results indicated that, compared to the baseline methods, MCGP effectively mitigated the impact of variations in affective states across different sessions. In single affective state cross-session scenario, identification performance for the same affective states was slightly higher than that for different affective states.