**Rami M. Jomaa 1,\*, Hassan Mathkour 1, Yakoub Bazi <sup>2</sup> and Md Saiful Islam <sup>1</sup>**


Received: 29 February 2020; Accepted: 4 April 2020; Published: 7 April 2020

**Abstract:** Although fingerprint-based systems are the commonly used biometric systems, they suffer from a critical vulnerability to a presentation attack (PA). Therefore, several approaches based on a fingerprint biometrics have been developed to increase the robustness against a PA. We propose an alternative approach based on the combination of fingerprint and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. An ECG signal has advantageous characteristics that prevent the replication. Combining a fingerprint with an ECG signal is a potentially interesting solution to reduce the impact of PAs in biometric systems. We also propose a novel end-to-end deep learning-based fusion neural architecture between a fingerprint and an ECG signal to improve PA detection in fingerprint biometrics. Our model uses state-of-the-art EfficientNets for generating a fingerprint feature representation. For the ECG, we investigate three different architectures based on fully-connected layers (FC), a 1D-convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), and a 2D-convolutional neural network (2D-CNN). The 2D-CNN converts the ECG signals into an image and uses inverted Mobilenet-v2 layers for feature generation. We evaluated the method on a multimodal dataset, that is, a customized fusion of the LivDet 2015 fingerprint dataset and ECG data from real subjects. Experimental results reveal that this architecture yields a better average classification accuracy compared to a single fingerprint modality.

**Keywords:** fingerprint; ECG; presentation attack detection; deep learning
