Analysis of Face Mask Effect on Speaker Recognition

Wearing a face mask affects the speech production. On top of that, the frequency response and radiation characteristics of the face mask - depending on the material and shape of the mask - adds to the complexity of analyzing speech under face mask. Our target is to separate the effect of muscle constriction and increased vocal effort in speech produced under face mask from sound transmission and radiation properties of face mask. In this paper, we measure up the far-field effects of wearing four different face masks; motorcycle helmet, rubber mask, surgical mask and scarf inside anechoic chamber. The measurement setup follows the recording configuration of a speech corpus used for speaker recognition experiments. In matching speech under face mask with speech under no mask, the frequency response of the respective face mask is accounted for and compensated for before acoustic feature extraction. The speaker recognition performance is reported using the state-of-the-art i-vector method for mismatched and compensated conditions in order to demonstrate the significance of knowing the type of mask and accounting for its sound transmission properties.