OCTAVE started by analysing the most significant baseline voice biometrics systems available in the market and in the open source world, to identify candidate voice biometric systems and study their vulnerability to spoofing attacks.
The core work was scheduled in two phases. An intermediate phase, carried out relatively early in the project run, ensured adoption of a commercial, state-of-the-art system and its enhancement with advanced anti-spoofing solutions, thus yielding the OCTAVE baseline platform. The second phase, corresponding to the final delivery, enhanced the baseline ASV engines and integrated the platform with generalised countermeasures, with solutions ensuring reliability of ASV systems in adverse noise conditions and hybrid speaker verification functionality. The delivered hybrid methods exploit the information provided by different modes of operation, such as prompted text-dependent and text-independent speaker verification, to yield a more accurate speaker verification system, more robust as well against spoofing attacks.
The legal and regulatory framework for protection of personal data in effect in EU and in the member states where project partners generating or processing sensitive user data are based, was surveyed, adopted and used as check-reference to monitor implementation of the solutions, as well as planning and execution of user trials.
The TBAS platform was delivered and deployed in a secure cloud infrastructure. User verification is split in two distinct domains, (1) Identity Management and (2) User Authentication, in the realm of distinct players, thus conforming to the principle of “security by design”, and making it virtually impossible to hack with user data and to break the security of the whole platform.
OCTAVE has paid special attention to in-lab assessment of objective performance of the deployed services and to the end-user reaction to voice biometrics technology, in real life environments. For laboratory assessment, a number of standardized datasets clustering several voice corpora were used to test the system objective performance. As regards the in-field evaluation by the end-users, two project partners provided the experimental real life environments where the potential users could fully use the OCTAVE solution.
Validation results, arising from the final testing phases during physical and online authentication, were used to elaborate the roll out plan bridging the gap between technology and real commercial use.
