Spoofing detection from a feature representation perspective

Spoofing detection, which discriminates the spoofed speech from the natural speech, has gained much attention recently. Low-dimensional features that are used in speaker recognition/verification are also used in spoofing detection. Unfortunately, they don't capture sufficient information required for spoofing detection. In this work, we investigate the use of high-dimensional features for spoofing detection, that maybe more sensitive to the artifacts in the spoofed speech. Six types of high-dimensional feature are employed. For each kind of feature, four different representations are extracted, i.e. the original high-dimensional feature, corresponding low-dimensional feature, the low- and the high-frequency regions of the original high-dimensional feature. Dynamic features are also calculated to assess the effectiveness of the temporal information to detect the artifacts across frames. A neural network-based classifier is adopted to handle the high-dimensional features. Experimental results on the standard ASVspoof 2015 corpus suggest that high-dimensional features and dynamic features are useful for spoofing attack detection. A fusion of them has been shown to achieve 0.0% the equal error rates for nine of ten attack types.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Accepted versio

Long Term Spectral Statistics for Voice Presentation Attack Detection

Automatic speaker verification systems can be spoofed through recorded, synthetic or voice converted speech of target speakers. To make these systems practically viable, the detection of such attacks, referred to as presentation attacks, is of paramount interest. In that direction, this paper investigates two aspects: (a) a novel approach to detect presentation attacks where, unlike conventional approaches, no speech signal related assumptions are made, rather the attacks are detected by computing first order and second order spectral statistics and feeding them to a classifier, and (b) generalization of the presentation attack detection systems across databases. Our investigations on Interspeech 2015 ASVspoof challenge dataset and AVspoof dataset show that, when compared to the approaches based on conventional short-term spectral processing, the proposed approach with a linear discriminative classifier yields a better system, irrespective of whether the spoofed signal is replayed to the microphone or is directly injected into the system software process. Cross-database investigations show that neither the short-term spectral processing based approaches nor the proposed approach yield systems which are able to generalize across databases or methods of attack. Thus, revealing the difficulty of the problem and the need for further resources and research

Replay detection in voice biometrics: an investigation of adaptive and non-adaptive front-ends

Among various physiological and behavioural traits, speech has gained popularity as an effective mode of biometric authentication. Even though they are gaining popularity, automatic speaker verification systems are vulnerable to malicious attacks, known as spoofing attacks. Among various types of spoofing attacks, replay attack poses the biggest threat due to its simplicity and effectiveness. This thesis investigates the importance of 1) improving front-end feature extraction via novel feature extraction techniques and 2) enhancing spectral components via adaptive front-end frameworks to improve replay attack detection. This thesis initially focuses on AM-FM modelling techniques and their use in replay attack detection. A novel method to extract the sub-band frequency modulation (FM) component using the spectral centroid of a signal is proposed, and its use as a potential acoustic feature is also discussed. Frequency Domain Linear Prediction (FDLP) is explored as a method to obtain the temporal envelope of a speech signal. The temporal envelope carries amplitude modulation (AM) information of speech resonances. Several features are extracted from the temporal envelope and the FDLP residual signal. These features are then evaluated for replay attack detection and shown to have significant capability in discriminating genuine and spoofed signals. Fusion of AM and FM-based features has shown that AM and FM carry complementary information that helps distinguish replayed signals from genuine ones. The importance of frequency band allocation when creating filter banks is studied as well to further advance the understanding of front-ends for replay attack detection. Mechanisms inspired by the human auditory system that makes the human ear an excellent spectrum analyser have been investigated and integrated into front-ends. Spatial differentiation, a mechanism that provides additional sharpening to auditory filters is one of them that is used in this work to improve the selectivity of the sub-band decomposition filters. Two features are extracted using the improved filter bank front-end: spectral envelope centroid magnitude (SECM) and spectral envelope centroid frequency (SECF). These are used to establish the positive effect of spatial differentiation on discriminating spoofed signals. Level-dependent filter tuning, which allows the ear to handle a large dynamic range, is integrated into the filter bank to further improve the front-end. This mechanism converts the filter bank into an adaptive one where the selectivity of the filters is varied based on the input signal energy. Experimental results show that this leads to improved spoofing detection performance. Finally, deep neural network (DNN) mechanisms are integrated into sub-band feature extraction to develop an adaptive front-end that adjusts its characteristics based on the sub-band signals. A DNN-based controller that takes sub-band FM components as input, is developed to adaptively control the selectivity and sensitivity of a parallel filter bank to enhance the artifacts that differentiate a replayed signal from a genuine signal. This work illustrates gradient-based optimization of a DNN-based controller using the feedback from a spoofing detection back-end classifier, thus training it to reduce spoofing detection error. The proposed framework has displayed a superior ability in identifying high-quality replayed signals compared to conventional non-adaptive frameworks. All techniques proposed in this thesis have been evaluated on well-established databases on replay attack detection and compared with state-of-the-art baseline systems