arXiv subjects

Md Sahidullah

Publications and source records attributed to Md Sahidullah.

79 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Introduction to Voice Presentation Attack Detection and Recent Advances

Over the past few years significant progress has been made in the field of presentation attack detection (PAD) for automatic speaker recognition (ASV). This includes the development of new speech corpora, standard evaluation protocols and advancements in front-end feature extraction and back-end classifiers. The use of standard databases and evaluation protocols has enabled for the first time the meaningful benchmarking of different PAD solutions. This chapter summarises the progress, with a focus on studies completed in the last three years. The article presents a summary of findings and lessons learned from two ASVspoof challenges, the first community-led benchmarking efforts. These show that ASV PAD remains an unsolved problem and that further attention is required to develop generalised PAD solutions which have potential to detect diverse and previously unseen spoofing attacks.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2018

Novel Quality Metric for Duration Variability Compensation in Speaker Verification using i-Vectors

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) is the process to recognize persons using voice as biometric. The ASV systems show considerable recognition performance with sufficient amount of speech from matched condition. One of the crucial challenges of ASV technology is to improve recognition performance with speech segments of short duration. In short duration condition, the model parameters are not properly estimated due to inadequate speech information, and this results poor recognition accuracy even with the state-of-the-art i-vector based ASV system. We hypothesize that considering the estimation quality during recognition process would help to improve the ASV performance. This can be incorporated as a quality measure during fusion of ASV systems. This paper investigates a new quality measure for i-vector representation of speech utterances computed directly from Baum-Welch statistics. The proposed metric is subsequently used as quality measure during fusion of ASV systems. In experiments with the NIST SRE 2008 corpus, We have shown that inclusion of proposed quality metric exhibits considerable improvement in speaker verification performance. The results also indicate the potentiality of the proposed method in real-world scenario with short test utterances.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2018

Can We Use Speaker Recognition Technology to Attack Itself? Enhancing Mimicry Attacks Using Automatic Target Speaker Selection

We consider technology-assisted mimicry attacks in the context of automatic speaker verification (ASV). We use ASV itself to select targeted speakers to be attacked by human-based mimicry. We recorded 6 naive mimics for whom we select target celebrities from VoxCeleb1 and VoxCeleb2 corpora (7,365 potential targets) using an i-vector system. The attacker attempts to mimic the selected target, with the utterances subjected to ASV tests using an independently developed x-vector system. Our main finding is negative: even if some of the attacker scores against the target speakers were slightly increased, our mimics did not succeed in spoofing the x-vector system. Interestingly, however, the relative ordering of the selected targets (closest, furthest, median) are consistent between the systems, which suggests some level of transferability between the systems.

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arXiv2018

Transforming acoustic characteristics to deceive playback spoofing countermeasures of speaker verification systems

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems use a playback detector to filter out playback attacks and ensure verification reliability. Since current playback detection models are almost always trained using genuine and played-back speech, it may be possible to degrade their performance by transforming the acoustic characteristics of the played-back speech close to that of the genuine speech. One way to do this is to enhance speech "stolen" from the target speaker before playback. We tested the effectiveness of a playback attack using this method by using the speech enhancement generative adversarial network to transform acoustic characteristics. Experimental results showed that use of this "enhanced stolen speech" method significantly increases the equal error rates for the baseline used in the ASVspoof 2017 challenge and for a light convolutional neural network-based method. The results also showed that its use degrades the performance of a Gaussian mixture model-universal background model-based ASV system. This type of attack is thus an urgent problem needing to be solved.

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arXiv2017

Lung sound classification using local binary pattern

Lung sounds contain vital information about pulmonary pathology. In this paper, we use short-term spectral characteristics of lung sounds to recognize associated diseases. Motivated by the success of auditory perception based techniques in speech signal classification, we represent time-frequency information of lung sounds using mel-scale warped spectral coefficients, called here as mel-frequency spectral coefficients (MFSCs). Next, we employ local binary pattern analysis (LBP) to capture texture information of the MFSCs, and the feature vectors are subsequently derived using histogram representation. The proposed features are used with three well-known classifiers in this field: k-nearest neighbor (kNN), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM). Also, the performance was tested with multiple SVM kernels. We conduct extensive performance evaluation experiments using two databases which include normal and adventitious sounds. Results show that the proposed features with SVM and also with kNN classifier outperform commonly used wavelet-based features as well as our previously investigated mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) based statistical features, specifically in abnormal sound detection. Proposed features also yield better results than morphological features and energy features computed from rational dilation wavelet coefficients. The Bhattacharyya kernel performs considerably better than other kernels. Further, we optimize the configuration of the proposed feature extraction algorithm. Finally, we have applied mRMR (minimum-redundancy maximum-relevancy) based feature selection method to remove redundancy in the feature vector which makes the proposed method computationally more efficient without any degradation in the performance. The overall performance gain is up to 24.5% as compared to the standard wavelet feature based system.

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arXiv2016

Robustness of Voice Conversion Techniques Under Mismatched Conditions

Most of the existing studies on voice conversion (VC) are conducted in acoustically matched conditions between source and target signal. However, the robustness of VC methods in presence of mismatch remains unknown. In this paper, we report a comparative analysis of different VC techniques under mismatched conditions. The extensive experiments with five different VC techniques on CMU ARCTIC corpus suggest that performance of VC methods substantially degrades in noisy conditions. We have found that bilinear frequency warping with amplitude scaling (BLFWAS) outperforms other methods in most of the noisy conditions. We further explore the suitability of different speech enhancement techniques for robust conversion. The objective evaluation results indicate that spectral subtraction and log minimum mean square error (logMMSE) based speech enhancement techniques can be used to improve the performance in specific noisy conditions.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2016

Spoofing Detection Goes Noisy: An Analysis of Synthetic Speech Detection in the Presence of Additive Noise

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) technology is recently finding its way to end-user applications for secure access to personal data, smart services or physical facilities. Similar to other biometric technologies, speaker verification is vulnerable to spoofing attacks where an attacker masquerades as a particular target speaker via impersonation, replay, text-to-speech (TTS) or voice conversion (VC) techniques to gain illegitimate access to the system. We focus on TTS and VC that represent the most flexible, high-end spoofing attacks. Most of the prior studies on synthesized or converted speech detection report their findings using high-quality clean recordings. Meanwhile, the performance of spoofing detectors in the presence of additive noise, an important consideration in practical ASV implementations, remains largely unknown. To this end, we analyze the suitability of state-of-the-art synthetic speech detectors under additive noise with a special focus on front-end features. Our comparison includes eight acoustic feature sets, five related to spectral magnitude and three to spectral phase information. Our extensive experiments on ASVSpoof 2015 corpus reveal several important findings. Firstly, all the countermeasures break down even at relatively high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and fail to generalize to noisy conditions. Secondly, speech enhancement is not found helpful. Thirdly, GMM back-end generally outperforms the more involved i-vector back-end. Fourthly, concerning the compared features, the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and subband spectral centroid magnitude coefficients (SCMCs) perform the best on average though the winner method depends on SNR and noise type. Finally, a study with two score fusion strategies shows that combining different feature based systems improves recognition accuracy for known and unknown attacks in both clean and noisy conditions.

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