Joint Operation of Voice Biometrics and Presentation Attack Detection

Research in the area of automatic speaker verification (ASV) has advanced enough for the industry to start using ASV systems in practical applications. However, as it was also shown for fingerprints, face, and other verification systems, ASV systems are highly vulnerable to spoofing or presentation attacks, limiting their wide practical deployment. Therefore, to protect against such attacks, effective anti-spoofing detection techniques, more formally known as presentation attack detection (PAD) systems, need to be developed. These techniques should be then seamlessly integrated into existing ASV systems for practical all-in-one solutions. In this paper, we focus on the integration of PAD and ASV systems. We consider the state of the art i-vector and ISV-based ASV systems and demonstrate the effect of score-based integration with a PAD system on the verification and attack detection accuracies. In our experiments, we rely on AVspoof database that contains realistic presentation attacks, which are considered by the industry to be the threat to practical ASV systems. Experimental results show a significantly increased resistance of the joint ASV-PAD system to the attacks at the expense of slightly degraded performance for scenarios without spoofing attacks. Also, an important contribution of the paper is an open source and an online-based implementations of the separate and joint ASV-PAD systems

BEAT: An Open-Source Web-Based Open-Science Platform

With the increased interest in computational sciences, machine learning (ML), pattern recognition (PR) and big data, governmental agencies, academia and manufacturers are overwhelmed by the constant influx of new algorithms and techniques promising improved performance, generalization and robustness. Sadly, result reproducibility is often an overlooked feature accompanying original research publications, competitions and benchmark evaluations. The main reasons behind such a gap arise from natural complications in research and development in this area: the distribution of data may be a sensitive issue; software frameworks are difficult to install and maintain; Test protocols may involve a potentially large set of intricate steps which are difficult to handle. Given the raising complexity of research challenges and the constant increase in data volume, the conditions for achieving reproducible research in the domain are also increasingly difficult to meet. To bridge this gap, we built an open platform for research in computational sciences related to pattern recognition and machine learning, to help on the development, reproducibility and certification of results obtained in the field. By making use of such a system, academic, governmental or industrial organizations enable users to easily and socially develop processing toolchains, re-use data, algorithms, workflows and compare results from distinct algorithms and/or parameterizations with minimal effort. This article presents such a platform and discusses some of its key features, uses and limitations. We overview a currently operational prototype and provide design insights.Comment: References to papers published on the platform incorporate

BEAT: An Open-Science Web Platform

With the increased interest in computational sciences, machine learning (ML), pattern recognition (PR) and big data, governmental agencies, academia and manufacturers are overwhelmed by the constant influx of new algorithms and techniques promising improved performance, generalization and robustness. Sadly, result reproducibility is often an overlooked feature accompanying original research publications, competitions and benchmark evaluations. The main reasons behind such a gap arise from natural complications in research and development in this area: the distribution of data may be a sensitive issue; software frameworks are difficult to install and maintain; Test protocols may involve a potentially large set of intricate steps which are difficult to handle. To bridge this gap, we built an open platform for research in computational sciences related to pattern recognition and machine learning, to help on the development, reproducibility and certification of results obtained in the field. By making use of such a system, academic, governmental or industrial organizations enable users to easily and socially develop processing toolchains, re-use data, algorithms, workflows and compare results from distinct algorithms and/or parameterizations with minimal effort. This article presents such a platform and discusses some of its key features, uses and limitations. We overview a currently operational prototype and provide design insights

A Review of Voice-Base Person Identification: State-of-the-Art

Automated person identification and authentication systems are useful for national security, integrity of electoral processes, prevention of cybercrimes and many access control applications. This is a critical component of information and communication technology which is central to national development. The use of biometrics systems in identification is fast replacing traditional methods such as use of names, personal identification numbers codes, password, etc., since nature bestow individuals with distinct personal imprints and signatures. Different measures have been put in place for person identification, ranging from face, to fingerprint and so on. This paper highlights the key approaches and schemes developed in the last five decades for voice-based person identification systems. Voice-base recognition system has gained interest due to its non-intrusive technique of data acquisition and its increasing method of continually studying and adapting to the person’s changes. Information on the benefits and challenges of various biometric systems are also presented in this paper. The present and prominent voice-based recognition methods are discussed. It was observed that these systems application areas have covered intelligent monitoring, surveillance, population management, election forensics, immigration and border control

Impact of score fusion on voice biometrics and presentation attack detection in cross-database evaluations

Research in the area of automatic speaker verification (ASV) has been advanced enough for the industry to start using ASV systems in practical applications. However, these systems are highly vulnerable to spoofing or presentation attacks, limiting their wide deployment. Therefore, it is important to develop mechanisms that can detect such attacks, and it is equally important for these mechanisms to be seamlessly integrated into existing ASV systems for practical and attack-resistant solutions. To be practical, however, an attack detection should (i) have high accuracy, (ii) be well-generalized for different attacks, and (iii) be simple and efficient. Several audio-based presentation attack detection (PAD) methods have been proposed recently but their evaluation was usually done on a single, often obscure, database with limited number of attacks. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct an extensive study of eight state-of-the-art PAD methods and evaluate their ability to detect known and unknown attacks (e.g., in a cross-database scenario) using two major publicly available speaker databases with spoofing attacks: AVspoof and ASVspoof. We investigate whether combining several PAD systems via score fusion can improve attack detection accuracy. We also study the impact of fusing PAD systems (via parallel and cascading schemes) with two i-vector and inter-session variability based ASV systems on the overall performance in both bona fide (no attacks) and spoof scenarios. The evaluation results question the efficiency and practicality of the existing PAD systems, especially when comparing results for individual databases and cross-database data. Fusing several PAD systems can lead to a slightly improved performance; however, how to select which systems to fuse remains an open question. Joint ASV-PAD systems show a significantly increased resistance to the attacks at the expense of slightly degraded performance for bona fide scenarios