Abstract
The emerging field of biometric authentication over the Internet requires both robust person authentication and secure computer network protocols. This paper presents investigations of vocal biometric person authentication over the Internet, both at the protocol and authentication robustness levels. As part of this study, an appropriate client-server architecture for biometrics on the Internet is proposed and implemented. It is shown that the transmission of raw biometric data in this application is likely to result in unacceptably long delays in the process. On the other hand, by using data models (or features), the transmission time can be reduced to an acceptable level. The use of encryption/decryption for enhancing the data security in the proposed client-server link and its effects on the transmission time are also examined. Furthermore, the scope of the investigations includes an analysis of the effects of packet loss and speech coding on speaker verification performance. It is experimentally demonstrated that whilst the adverse effects of packet loss can be negligible, the encoding of speech, particularly at a low bit rate, can reduce the verification accuracy considerably. The paper details the experimental investigations conducted and presents an analysis of the results.
Highlights
The ever-increasing use of the Internet-enabled devices is resulting in normal activities in day-to-day life, such as banking and shopping, being conducted without face-to-face or personal contacts
The idea is to duplicate an existing and well-known database used for speaker verification (XM2VTS) by passing its speech signals through different coders and different network conditions representative of what can occur over the Internet
We can see that whatever the packet loss level is, the equal error rate (EER) remains very low for clean speech or slightly compressed speech (G711)
Summary
The ever-increasing use of the Internet-enabled devices is resulting in normal activities in day-to-day life, such as banking and shopping, being conducted without face-to-face or personal contacts. In some applications (e.g., man-machine dialogue), speaker verification is only one subsystem amongst a number of other subsystems In such cases, the effective operation of the whole system depends heavily on the response time of the individual subsystems; (iv) speech packets (or other personal information) transmitted over IP could be intercepted and captured by impostors, and subsequently used, for instance, for fraudulent access authorisation. This paper is the first to present an overview of issues and problems in the above area These include architecture and protocol considerations (Section 2), speaker verification robustness to speech coding and packet loss over IP networks (Section 3), and wireless mobile devices (Section 4). This work is currently conducted in the framework of COST Action 275 (http://www.fub.it/cost275/)
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