Disentangled Representation Learning for Robust Brainprint Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) biometrics draws increasing attention in high-security requirements due to its advantages of anti-spoofing, live traits, and non-duplicated. However, existing EEG datasets, which rely on external stimuli or task-specific instructions for data collection, often intertwine identity-related information with biases such as emotional states, cognitive tasks, and disease markers. Besides, EEG signals are time-varying, while identity information within EEG signals is relatively fixed, which poses challenges for extracting identity features from EEG to perform accurate person identification. This high correlation hampers the promotion of brainprint recognition in real-life applications. In this paper, we propose a disentangled representation learning based identity recognition framework, which disentangles the EEG signal into intrinsic identity-related information and biased identity-invariant information, thus enhancing the performance of EEG biometrics. First, two parallel encoders are used to extract intrinsic identity-relevant and bias identity-irrelevant factors, respectively, and each encoder consists of a temporal filter module and a novel spatial-temporal attention module. Then, we further refine the disentanglement process through a correlation-driven loss that minimizes factor similarity across spatial-temporal and global representational domains. Adversarial training and reconstruction regularization are introduced to facilitate the identity and biased representations to be independent and complementary to each other. Additionally, we extend supervised contrastive learning to the component level, minimizing cross-component similarity and encouraging each component to independently reflect its unique information, thereby improving the disentanglement efficacy. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse datasets encompassing emotional, motor imagery, and pathological conditions, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed brainprint identity recognition model.