Joining forces of voice and facial biometrics: A case study in the scope of NIST SRE’19

While other chapters of this book are devoted to voice biometrics, in this chapter we present an example of joining forces of voice biometrics with other modalities. The focus of this chapter is the combination (fusion) of voice and facial biometrics, also called audiovisual biometrics. It is well known that multi-biometric systems have the advantage of improving the accuracy over single systems, providing increased security, and making spoofing attacks more difficult. Regarding voice biometrics, combining voice and facial biometrics provides specific advantages that can be exploited in various manners. Combining voice and facial biometrics has the unique advantage that they can be acquired simultaneously, without providing an additional burden for the user. Of course, besides the microphone, a camera is needed. With the increasing use of videos, it becomes more and more natural to treat videos (with sequence of images and sound). Therefore, combining voice and facial biometrics is an interesting combination in order to provide better biometric performance while making imposture more difficult. As an example, we can refer to the latest US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2019 speaker recognition evaluation (SRE’19) challenge1 that besides the usual speaker recognition challenge included for the first time an audiovisual challenge. Telecom SudParis (TSP) participated in this challenge. This chapter provides a description of the TSP speaker and face recognition systems as well as the advantages obtained by combining voice and facial biometrics.