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Study on the Effect of Face Masks on Forensic Speaker Recognition

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Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13407))

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the use of face masks. Face masks can affect both the acoustic properties of the signal and the speech patterns and have undesirable effects on automatic speech recognition systems as well as on forensic speaker recognition and identification systems. This is because the masks introduce both intrinsic and extrinsic variability into the audio signals. Moreover, their filtering effect varies depending on the type of mask used. In this paper we explore the impact of the use of different masks on the performance of an automatic speaker recognition system based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients to characterise the voices and on Support Vector Machines to perform the classification task. The results show that masks slightly affect the classification results. The effects vary depending on the type of mask used, but not as expected, as the results with FPP2 masks are better than those with surgical masks. An increase in speech intensity has been found with the FPP2 mask, which is related to the increased vocal effort made to counteract the effects of hearing loss.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Spanish, only the first two formants, F1 and F2, have the characteristics that make the difference between one vowel sound and another. This is due to the relationship between the location of the formants in the spectrogram and the position of the organs involved in articulation [27].

  2. 2.

    According to Delgado-Romero [8], “a control sample is one that belongs to a known subject, while a recovered sample is anonymous, i.e. the identity of the person who carried it out is not known”.

  3. 3.

    The corpus repository and the ASR system are available at: https://tinyurl.com/8h8dteuu.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Research Grants Program of the Universidad de Alcalá. We acknowledge the valuable counsel and resources provided by G. A. Acha Ruiz, as well as to the Department of Forensic Acoustics of the “Comisaría General de Policía Científica” for the access to the LOCUPOL database sentences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones, Universidad de Alcalá, 28871, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Georgiana Bogdanel, Nadia Belghazi-Mohamed, Hilario Gómez-Moreno & Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo

  2. Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Ciencias Policiales, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Alcalá, 28801, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Hilario Gómez-Moreno & Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo

Authors
  1. Georgiana Bogdanel
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  2. Nadia Belghazi-Mohamed
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  3. Hilario Gómez-Moreno
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  4. Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hilario Gómez-Moreno .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain

    Cristina Alcaraz

  2. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Liqun Chen

  3. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Shujun Li

  4. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Pierangela Samarati

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Bogdanel, G., Belghazi-Mohamed, N., Gómez-Moreno, H., Lafuente-Arroyo, S. (2022). Study on the Effect of Face Masks on Forensic Speaker Recognition. In: Alcaraz, C., Chen, L., Li, S., Samarati, P. (eds) Information and Communications Security. ICICS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15777-6_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15777-6_33

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