Evaluation of Data Processing and Machine Learning Techniques in P300-based Authentication using Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are used in various application scenarios allowing direct communication between the brain and computers. Specifically, electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most common techniques for obtaining evoked potentials resulting from external stimuli, as the P300 potential is elicited from known images. The combination of Machine Learning (ML) and P300 potentials is promising for authenticating subjects since the brain waves generated by each person when facing a particular stimulus are unique. However, existing authentication solutions do not extensively explore P300 potentials and fail when analyzing the most suitable processing and ML-based classification techniques. Thus, this work proposes i) a framework for authenticating BCI users using the P300 potential; ii) the validation of the framework on ten subjects creating an experimental scenario employing a non-invasive EEG-based BCI; and iii) the evaluation of the framework performance defining two experiments (binary and multiclass ML classification) and three testing configurations incrementally analyzing the performance of different processing techniques and the differences between classifying with epochs or statistical values. This framework achieved a performance close to 100\% f1-score in both experiments for the best classifier, highlighting its effectiveness in accurately authenticating users and demonstrating the feasibility of performing EEG-based authentication using P300 potentials.