CipherVOX: scalable low-complexity speaker verification

Biometrics is gaining strong support for access control in the industry. It is not uncommon for individual users to be faced with a half-dozen or more passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs) controlling access to the systems required for them to do their job. The ubiquity of passwords actually relaxes system security since many users tend to use the same password across all applications, or collect the various passwords in a single location (perhaps a password protected spreadsheet, or a piece of paper in a desk drawer). The latter case is of extreme concern since security around the collection is much more easily compromised than that of the system. The use of biometrics not only recovers the ability to secure sensitive systems and data, but also does so in a user-friendly manner. In order to use biometrics successfully in server-based environments, several key concerns must be addressed. First, the authentication strategy must maintain acceptable levels of security. Second, the user community must accept the chosen biometric (unless there is a captive audience). The last major consideration is the scalability of the solution. In this paper we introduce CipherVOX, a speaker verification access control solution for server and standalone computing environments. We discuss the use of our polynomial-based classifier that combines high-accuracy and low-complexity via discriminative techniques, and give performance results for both a proprietary performance database and the standard YOHO database. We also review the challenges in designing for user acceptance, including the design of the speaker verification user interface, as well as the applicationprogramming interface (API).