Automatic versus human speaker verification: The case of voice mimicry

In this work, we compare the performance of three modern speaker verification systems and non-expert human listeners in the presence of voice mimicry. Our goal is to gain insights on how vulnerable speaker verification systems are to mimicry attack and compare it to the performance of human listeners. We study both traditional Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) and an i-vector based classifier with cosine scoring and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) scoring. For the studied material in Finnish language, the mimicry attack decreased lightly the equal error rate (EER) for GMM-UBM from 10.83 to 10.31, while for i-vector systems the EER increased from 6.80 to 13.76 and from 4.36 to 7.38. The performance of the human listening panel shows that imitated speech increases the difficulty of the speaker verification task. It is even more difficult to recognize a person who is intentionally concealing his or her identity. For Impersonator A, the average listener made 8 errors from 34 trials while the automatic systems had 6 errors in the same set. The average listener for Impersonator B made 7 errors from the 28 trials, while the automatic systems made 7 to 9 errors. A statistical analysis of the listener performance was also conducted. We found out a statistically significant association, with p = 0.00019 and R = 0.59, between listener accuracy and self reported factors only when familiar voices were present in the test.