EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 4, Pages 542-558
doi:10.1155/S1110865704309248

Handwriting: Feature Correlation Analysis for Biometric Hashes

Claus Vielhauer1,2,3 and Ralf Steinmetz1

1Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt 64283, Germany
2Platanista GmbH, Dessau 06846, Germany
3Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg 39106, Germany

Received 17 November 2002; Revised 9 September 2003

Abstract

In the application domain of electronic commerce, biometric authentication can provide one possible solution for the key management problem. Besides server-based approaches, methods of deriving digital keys directly from biometric measures appear to be advantageous. In this paper, we analyze one of our recently published specific algorithms of this category based on behavioral biometrics of handwriting, the biometric hash. Our interest is to investigate to which degree each of the underlying feature parameters contributes to the overall intrapersonal stability and interpersonal value space. We will briefly discuss related work in feature evaluation and introduce a new methodology based on three components: the intrapersonal scatter (deviation), the interpersonal entropy, and the correlation between both measures. Evaluation of the technique is presented based on two data sets of different size. The method presented will allow determination of effects of parameterization of the biometric system, estimation of value space boundaries, and comparison with other feature selection approaches.