ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Speaker recognition for speech under face cover

Rahim Saeidi, Tuija Niemi, Hanna Karppelin, Jouni Pohjalainen, Tomi Kinnunen, Paavo Alku

Speech under face cover constitute a case that is increasingly met by forensic speech experts. Wearing face cover mostly happens when an individual strives to conceal his or her identity. Based on the material of face cover and the level of contact with speech production organs, speech production becomes affected by face mask and a part of speech energy gets absorbed in the mask. There has been little research on how speech acoustics is affected by different face masks and how face covers might affect performance of automatic speaker recognition systems. In the present paper, we have collected speech under face mask with the aim of studying the effects of wearing different masks on state-of-the-art text-independent automatic speaker recognition system. The preliminary speaker recognition rates along with mask identification experiments are presented in this paper.