The Filtering Effect of Face Masks in their Detection from Speech

Face masks alter the speakers' voice, as their intrinsic properties provide them with acoustic absorption capabilities. Hence, face masks act as filters to the human voice. This work focuses on the automatic detection of face masks from speech signals, emphasising on a previous work claiming that face masks attenuate frequencies above 1 kHz. We compare a paralinguistics-based and a spectrograms-based approach for the task at hand. While the former extracts paralinguistic features from filtered versions of the original speech samples, the latter exploits the spectrogram representations of the speech samples containing specific ranges of frequencies. The machine learning techniques investigated for the paralinguistics-based approach include Support Vector Machines (SVM), and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). For the spectrograms-based approach, we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our experiments are conducted on the Mask Augsburg Speech Corpus (MASC), released for the Interspeech 2020 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (COMPARE). The best performances on the test set from the paralinguistic analysis are obtained using the high-pass filtered versions of the original speech samples. Nonetheless, the highest Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) on the test set is obtained when exploiting the spectrograms with frequency content below 1 kHz.