Audio-visual Identity Verification: An Introductory Overview

Verification of identity is commonly achieved by looking at the face of a person and listening to his (her) speech. Automatic means of achieving this verification has been studied for several decades. Indeed, a talking face offers many features to achieve a robust verification of identity. The current deployment of videophones drives new opportunities for a secured access to remote servers (banking, certification, call centers, etc.). The synchrony of the speech signal and lip movements is a necessary condition to check that the observed talking face has not been manipulated and/or synthesized. This overview addresses face, speaker and talking face verification, as well as face and voice transformation techniques. It is demonstrated that a dedicated impostor needs limited information from a client to fool state of the art audio-visual identity verification systems.