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Voice Biometric: A Technology for Voice Based Authentication

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 Article
Advanced Science,
Copyright © 2018 American Scientific Publishers
Engineering and Medicine
All rights reserved Vol. 10, 1–6, 2018
Printed in the United States of America www.aspbs.com/asem

Voice Biometric: A Technology for Voice

Based Authentication
Nilu Singh∗ , Alka Agrawal, and R. A. Khan
SIST-DIT, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University (A Central University), Lucknow, UP, India

Recognizing a person’s individuality by his/her voice is known as Automatic Speaker Recognition

(ASR). Speaker recognition falls in the category of biometric security systems. Biometric is related
to human characteristics or individuality. Biometric verification or realistic authentication is used
to recognize an individual through his/her voice individual characteristic. Voice biometric includes
behavioral or physiological measurements of individual. Behavioral biometric is performed by Voice,
Signature, Keystrokes, and Typing etc. whereas physiological biometric includes iris, face, retina,
fingerprints, ear, DNA etc. Now a days voice biometric is emerging research area. This paper
presents a review dealing with the process of recognizing human beings from biometric data.
Keywords: Forensic Linguistics, Biometrics and Its Types, Forensic Speaker Recognition,
Speaker Recognition, Prosodic, Applications of Speaker Recognition.

1. INTRODUCTION Forensic science is a method of crime investigation by

In today’s environment, where insecurity is everywhere
security has been one of the important issues. For provid-
ing security voice biometric is an emerging area especially
for the purpose of authentication.1 2 In voice biometric
speaker recognition is performed with the help of the
unique characteristics of human voice including physio-
logical and behavioral characteristics. These characteristics
have specific and appropriate features of voice and have
potential to recognizing a person.3 With this approach it
is also possible to authenticate a person irrespective of
changes of environment or channel. This approach is very
useful and cost effective as it is voice based biometric tech-
nique which is easily available in this digital era.4 5 There
exist many areas where this technique can be success-
fully implemented for security and investigation perspec-
tive. Few of the application areas of speaker recognition
system includes forensics, remote access control security,
web services, online calling, personalization of services
and customer relationship management, voice based bio-
metric system, voice based banking, surveillance/criminal
investigation etc.4–6 Figure 1 show that how biometric
related to human characteristics.
∗
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
gathering and examining criminal’s information.7 Com-
puter forensics or computer forensic science is an area
of digital forensic science. It is used in legal verification
through computers (for digital storage media). The aim
of digital forensic is to identifying, analysing, preserv-
ing, recovering and presenting specific information and
judgment concerning digital information.8 Digital foren-
sic is mainly associated with investigation related forensic
crimes through computers and the results are used in civil
legal proceedings. Digital forensic uses various techniques
to distinguish identity of individuals. Digital forensic is
a very young area for crime investigation.9 Forensic lin-
guistic is used for voice identification which is also called
forensic phonetics. It is performed on the basis of voice
acoustic qualities (if the voice is recorded anywhere e.g.,
on a tape, mobile phone or any other device).10 Identify-
ing a speaker with the help of forensic linguistic is called
forensic speaker recognition. It is important and challeng-
ing task. Forensic speaker recognition is an application of
speaker recognition.11
The term speaker recognition refers to speaker ver-
ification as well as speaker identification. Speaker
recognition/Voice recognition is the process of a person’s
authentication by his/her voice.5 It is also known as Bio-
metric Identification Technique (BIT).3 In this technique
human traits are used for identification and verification for

Adv. Sci. Eng. Med. 2018, Vol. 10, No. xx 2164-6627/2018/10/001/006 doi:10.1166/asem.2018.2219 1
Voice Biometric: A Technology for Voice Based Authentication
Figure 1. Types of biometric.
the purpose of access control. Speaker recognition tech-
nology is mainly used for three purposes. In authentication
purpose, forensic scenario, screening and indexing applica-
tions. Authentication refers to verify the identity of a user
who needs physical or logical access. Voice forensic refers
to comparing two voice samples to determine the source
of the same. Screening and indexing is refers to search of
specific speaker speech from large voice database.12
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the next
section describes about biometric techniques and their
types. Section 3 presents concept of speaker recognition
technology and its phases. In Section 4 prosodic features
are presented for speaker recognition. Section 5 describes
the applications of speaker recognition. In Section 6
describes the performance measurement of a biometric
system. Finally paper concludes at Section 7.
2. BIOMETRIC AND ITS TYPES
Biometric is a feature of human being by using which a
person can be recognized. The following properties have
been considered as guiding light to understand about what
biological features are best suited for biometric:13 14
A. Uniqueness: Something that differentiate individuals.
B. Universality: Something that everybody has.
C. Stability: Something which is constant over time for
each and every person.
D. Measurability: Something which is easy to measure.
E. Acceptability: Something which is well accepted by
people.
F. Performance: Something which has speed, accuracy
and robustness.
Figure 2. Types of physiological characteristics of human.
2 Adv. Sci. Eng. Med. 10, 1–6, 2018
Singh et al.
G. Non Confront: Something which cannot be easily
fooled.
The above properties forms the basis to decide what
features should be used as biometric. Every biometric has
individual purpose for its use such as security system,
crime investigation, voting system, Time accounting etc.
The selection of biometric depends on the requirement
for authentication.13 14 The available biometric examples
include DNA matching, eyes, ear, voice, face, fingerprint,
hand geometry, signature/writing etc. the Figures 2 and 3
shows about physiological and behavioral characteristics
of any person.
(a) DNA: Identification of an individual using the analysis
of DNA segments.
(b) Eyes (Eris and Retina): Use of the features found in
the eyes to identify an individual.
(c) Ear: Identification of someone by using the shape of
the ear.
(d) Face: The analysis of facial features for the authenti-
cation of an individual.
(e) Fingerprint: Use of the ridges and valleys found on
the surface tips on human fingers.
(f) Hand geometry: Use of the geometric features of the
hand.
(g) Signature/writing: The authentication of an individual
by the analysis of handwriting style.
(h) Voice Speaker Recognition): The use of the
voice/speech as a method of determining the identity of a
speaker.
The above mentioned are some biometrics which are
used for person authentication. Biometric is considered
for Security and accuracy, but the disadvantages are being
offensive of privacy and cost of implementation.14 Follow-
ing are some advantages of biometrics:
• Convenience
• Increased security
• Accuracy
• Non imitative
• Non sharable
• Cannot be lost
• Reduced paper work
• Easy to access.
The above advantage makes biometric systems more
secure and accurate. Biometric recognition is the
Singh et al.
Figure 3. Types of behavioural characteristics of human.
continuously developing branch of science. It is conve-
nient and reliable technology this allows using biometrics
in common life by making this technology easier and inter-
esting. Almost every country in the world is using at least
one biometric to recognize its nationals. Use of biometric
is increasing day to day for security. For example, In India
‘Aadhaar’ is the largest biometric database in the world,
about 480 million ‘Aadhaar’ numbers have been assigned
to the Indian nationals up to 2013.15
3. SPEAKER RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
Speaker recognition is a pattern recognition problem
which is a branch of machine learning. Speaker recog-
nition and speech recognition both come under voice
recognition, which is also known as voice biometric.
Speech and speaker recognition can be distinguished as
‘speaker recognition’ i.e., ‘who is speaking’ and ‘speech
recognition’ i.e., ‘what is being said.’16 17 Extraction of
speech signal is the main task in the development of
speaker recognition system. To extract speech features
from speech/voice signal there are many techniques avail-
able such as MFCC, LPCC, LPC, Prosodic etc. One of the
speech features is spectral features of speech signal which
is used to representing speaker’s voice characteristics.18 19
After feature extraction speaker models are created for
individual and stored as voice database. To create mod-
els for speakers, various modelling techniques including
GMM, HMM, pattern matching, frequency estimation,
vector quantization, decision tree and neural networks etc.
are used mainly.16
Automatic speaker recognition system has two phases
enrollment phase and verification phase. In enrollment
phase speaker’s voice is recorded and specific features
are extracted from speech signal/voice print. In verifica-
tion phase a voice sample/utterance is compared to stored
template or voice print.3 18 Speaker recognition can be
classified into speaker verification and speaker identifi-
cation. Identification and verification can be explained
as: In case of speaker identification, the voice sample
is compared with multiple templates from stored voice
database and the best match is selected e.g., compar-
ing a voice sample of an assaulter from previously pre-
dictable voice database of criminals and trying to find
best match in this case one speaker’s voice is matched
against ‘n’ templates so it is also called 1:n match. While
Adv. Sci. Eng. Med. 10, 1–6, 2018
Voice Biometric: A Technology for Voice Based Authentication
Figure 4. Phases of automatic speaker recognition system.
in case of verification speech sample is compared with
the claimed voice print e.g., presenting your identity card
to security officer, the security agent compare your face
to the photo attached in the identity card and verify
that either claimed identity is accepted or rejected so it
is 1:1 match.3 18 20 Figure 4 shows the common steps
involved in development of Automatic speaker recognition
system.
On the basis of process involved in verification and
identification it can be easily inferred that verification is
faster than identification. During the study in this area, it
has found that in most of the cases identification is per-
formed first to find the best match then only verification
is done to reach out a conclusive result. It can be justified
by taking an example suppose that “if a voice sample of
a suspected assaulter is captured then this voice sample is
matched with the previous formed voice database and tried
to find out best match of this sample (that is identification)
after that verification is performed then gives conclusive
result declaring true or false and the best match voice is
belong to that assaulter or not.
4. PROSODIC FOR SPEAKER
RECOGNITION
ASR has three common steps. These steps include data
acquisition, feature extraction and modelling techniques.
To extract features from speech signal, many feature
extraction techniques are available such as MFCC, LPC,
3
Voice Biometric: A Technology for Voice Based Authentication
LPCC, Prosodic etc. and for modelling HMM, GMM,
UBM etc. techniques are available.3 21
Automatic Speaker Recognition (ASR) is a procedure
to recognize a person using a machine by his/her spo-
ken words/sentence. This technology is useful to main-
tain security in various fields such as crime investigation,
access control, voice based banking and authenticity etc.
To develop ASR system, extraction of characteristic of
speech signal is one of the core tasks. The primary work
of feature extraction technique is to extract voice charac-
teristics from the speech signal. These voice characteris-
tics are unique to each and every person to be used to
distinguish them.22 23 Prosodic features for speech signal
are expressed in terms of stress (the relative prominence
of a syllable or musical note (especially with regard to
stress or pitch), rhythm (recurring at regular intervals) and
intonation (rise and fall of the voice pitch). These convey
required information to identify the spoken language.
Speech features used for speaker recognition may be
spectral (cepstral) features, phonetic features and prosodic
features.21 24 25 Traditional speaker recognition systems
depend on ‘spectral features’ which are extracted from
very short segment of speech signal. This technique is ade-
quate for clean data but the system performance degrades
if the data is noisy or there is handset variability.26
Unfortunately this technique is not suitable to extract
long-range speech features related to person’s speaking
behaviour such as prosodic, lexical and discourse related
habits. The purpose for using such long-range features
in speaker recognition system is to increase system per-
formance as compared to system using cepstral/spectral
features.27
As authors said in Refs. [28, 29] that it has been
found that by using long-range speech features, the sys-
tem performance has been improved. Another advantage
of such type of technique is to use long-range speech
features which replicate person’s behavioral characteris-
tics of speech features. Such type of features could have
potential for recognizing speakers as well as recognizing
characteristics of the speech, for example speaking rate,
speaking style, pitch etc. The main purpose of research
on long-range speech features is to understand speaking
behaviour.30 It is assumed that prosody is associated to
linguistic component of voice such as syllables and it is
noticeable that changes occur in measurable parameters for
example fundamental frequency F0, energy and duration
of speech.31
5. APPLICATIONS OF SPEAKER
RECOGNITION
In this digital era speaker recognition system has been
commercialized. This technology is now accepted by both
government and financial sectors for quick and secure
authentication.33 In recent years, use of biometric tech-
niques for person authentication is used in many areas
4 Adv. Sci. Eng. Med. 10, 1–6, 2018
Singh et al.
such as remote computers, financial transactions (credit
card accessibility), and voice based bank account accessi-
bility etc.32 Some applications are mentioned below which
have been implemented and used in different areas-are:
In February 2016, HSBC (UK high-street bank) and its
internet-based retail bank First Direct announced that it
was providing biometric banking software to access online
and phone accounts using fingerprint or voice of their
customers.34
In 2015 ICICI bank, India has made available voice
based password banking to their customers.
In August 2014 Go Vivace Inc. has installed a speaker
identification system in its telecom industry that has
allowed clients to positively search for an individual,
among millions of speakers by using just a recording of
their voice.35
In May 2013, Barclays Wealth has announced to use
passive speaker recognition to verify the identity of tele-
phone customers. The system used has been developed by
voice recognition chief Nuance.36
Nuance Voice Biometrics solutions have been deployed
in several major financial institutions across the world
including Banco Santander, Tangerine Bank, Royal Bank
of Canada, and Manulife.37
The above discussed examples are some deployed appli-
cations of speaker recognition.
In addition speaker recognition is also used in areas such
as criminal investigations and many more.3
6. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTS OF
BIOMETRIC SYSTEMS
The performance of speaker recognition system or biomet-
ric systems depends on the following factors:
• False Acceptance Rate (FAR)
• False Rejection Rate (FRR)
• Relative Operating Characteristic (ROC)
• Equal Error Rate
• Template Capacity.
A. False Acceptance Rate (FAR)
It is the probability that the recognition system matches
incorrectly (input pattern) with the non-matching template
in the speaker database, i.e., it measures the percent of
imposter recognition acceptance.2 12 13
B. False Rejection Rate (FRR)
It is the probability that the recognition system misses
the correct input pattern template which exists in the
speaker database, i.e., it measures the percent of true
speaker which are falsely rejected.
C. Relative Operating Characteristic (ROC)
It is a graphical classification between the FAR and
FRR. Speaker recognition system performs on the basis
of the result (accepted/rejected) of matching algorithm.
Matching algorithm gives results on a threshold; thresh-
old determines the recognition value close to a template
Singh et al.
stored in the database. Higher threshold reduces the FAR
but increases the FRR, while when threshold is reduced
then lower false non-match are found and more imposters
are accepted.2 12 13
D. Equal Error Rate
It is the rate where FAR and FRR both are equal. EER
is a prompt method to compare the accuracy of any system
with the help of different ROC curve. The lowest EER
shows more accurate system.4 21
E. Template Capacity
Template capacity of any system is defined as the max-
imum number of sets of data which can be stored in the
system.2
Speaker recognition performance is usually calculated by
detection error trade-off (DET) curves, equal error rate,
and a weighted cost value. To be more accurate, a speaker
recognition system should have lowest EER. It also have
high storage capacity.21 38
7. CONCLUSION
This paper has discussed about some important aspects
of Forensic Speaker Recognition. The term uniqueness is
considered as a principle of forensic techniques. Foren-
sic Linguistics (voice biometric) is the branch of sci-
ence and engineering to analyze the legal problem of
digital evidence. This technology is the combination of
science and law. Improvement in the system accuracy
is needed as these systems are used in many impor-
tant and secure fields including voice indexing, critical
medical records, online transactions, fraud and access con-
trol etc. This paper demonstrated the usefulness of foren-
sic linguistic in the security critical areas. In addition it
has also discussed about the techniques to be used to
develop such type of systems. The review helps in under-
standing the developments in biometric system and its
applications.
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Received: 25 July 2017. Accepted: 23 December 2017.