Computer Systems Science & Engineering Tech Science Press

DOI:10.32604/csse.2022.022722
Article

Cancelable Speaker Identification System Based on Optical-Like Encryption

Algorithms
Safaa El-Gazar1, Walid El-Shafai2,3,*, Ghada El-Banby4, Hesham F. A. Hamed1, Gerges M. Salama1,
Mohammed Abd-Elnaby5 and Fathi E. Abd El-Samie2,6

1
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Egyptian - Russian University, Cairo, Egypt
2
Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University,
Menouf, 32952, Egypt
3
Security Engineering Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, 11586, Saudi Arabia
4
Department of Industrial Electronics and Control Engineering, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Menouf,
32952, Egypt
5
Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, Taif, 21944, Saudi Arabia
6
Department of Information Technology, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman
University, Riyadh, 84428, Saudi Arabia
*Corresponding Author: Walid El-Shafai. Email: [Link]@[Link]
Received: 17 August 2021; Accepted: 30 September 2021

Abstract: Biometric authentication is a rapidly growing trend that is gaining

increasing attention in the last decades. It achieves safe access to systems using
biometrics instead of the traditional passwords. The utilization of a biometric in
its original format makes it usable only once. Therefore, a cancelable biometric
template should be used, so that it can be replaced when it is attacked. Cancelable
biometrics aims to enhance the security and privacy of biometric authentication.
Digital encryption is an efficient technique to be used in order to generate cancel-
able biometric templates. In this paper, a highly-secure encryption algorithm is
proposed to ensure secure biometric data in verification systems. The considered
biometric in this paper is the speech signal. The speech signal is transformed into
its spectrogram. Then, the spectrogram is encrypted using two cascaded optical
encryption algorithms. The first algorithm is the Optical Scanning Holography
(OSH) for its efficiency as an encryption tool. The OSH encrypted spectrogram
is encrypted using Double Random Phase Encoding (DRPE) by implementing
two Random Phase Masks (RPMs). After the two cascaded optical encryption
algorithms, the cancelable template is obtained. The verification is implemented
through correlation estimation between enrolled and test templates in their
encrypted format. If the correlation value is larger than a threshold value, the user
is authorized. The threshold value can be determined from the genuine and impos-
ter correlation distribution curves as the midpoint between the two curves. The
implementation of optical encryption is adopted using its software rather than
the optical setup. The efficiency of the proposed cancelable biometric algorithm
is illustrated by the simulation results. It can improve the biometric data security
without deteriorating the recognition accuracy. Simulation results give close-to-zero

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
88 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

values for the Equal Error Rate (EER) and close-to-one values for the Area under
Receiver Operator Characteristic (AROC) curve.

Keywords: Cancelable biometrics; spectrogram; OSH; DRPE; EER; AROC

1 Introduction
Biometric is a Greek derivation word, where Bio means life and Metric means to measure. Biometrics
represent the physical and behavioral characteristics that distinguish between individuals. A biometric can be
physical such as fingerprint, iris, palm-print, etc. On the other hand, it can be behavioral, such as voice, gait,
hand gesture, etc. [1]. The main thing that distinguishes biometrics is that it is impossible to have two people
with the same physical or behavioral biometrics. Due to biometric uniqueness, it is efficient and practical for
personal recognition. However, there is a limitation in using biometrics in privacy issues. When a biometric is
compromised, it is no longer valuable and cannot be used again. Therefore, it is necessary to store biometrics
in an intended destructive way, so that when a biometric is compromised, the hacked template can be
replaced by another destructive one in a different way. These intentional distorted biometric versions are
called cancelable biometrics [2]. Four characteristics must distinguish the cancelable biometrics:
1) Reusability. If a biometric template is compromised, it can be reissued.
2) Diversity. Each different application has its own cancelable biometric template.
3) Non-invertibility. Compromised biometric templates cannot be used to recover the original
biometrics.
4) Performance. Cancelable biometrics should not degrade the recognition performance [3]. A
cancelable biometric recognition system has two stages: (1) enrollment which means storage of
the individual cancelable biometrics in the database, and (2) authentication, where the test
biometric is converted to a cancelable template with the same method used in the enrollment
stage. Then the test and stored templates are matched, and hence, recognition is carried out. There
are different methods for cancelable biometrics such as random projection, cancelable biometric
filters, hybrid methods etc. A survey of cancelable biometric methods is provided in [4].
The main motivation of this paper is to introduce a new algorithm for cancelable biometrics for the
recognition systems based on voice-print. Speech signal is the biometric in this paper. Cancelable
biometrics is investigated through two cascaded optical encryption algorithms applied on the
spectrograms of the speech signals. The first optical encryption algorithm is the OSH followed by DRPE
with two randomly generated RPMs. Then, to verify the user identity, the same steps are applied on the
test speech signals. The correlation between the two encrypted templates is estimated and compared with
the threshold value to determine if a user is authorized or not. The proposed algorithm can achieve two
characteristics of cancelable biometrics, which are non-invertibility and high performance. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces some recent related studies. Section 3 gives the OSH
algorithm. Section 4 introduces the DRPE algorithm. Section 5 provides the proposed algorithm. Section
6 gives a discussion of the simulation results. Finally, Section 7 summarizes the concluding remarks.

2 Related Works
Cancelable biometrics is based on repeatable intentional distortion of different biometrics to use
deformed or transformed biometric versions in the verification process. Increasing user privacy and
preserving a high performance of the recognition process are two conflicting requirements of cancelable
biometric systems. Different algorithms have been proposed for cancelable biometrics. Some of them are
unimodal biometrics, which use only one biometric for the verification process. Some others are
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 89

multimodal biometrics that use more than one biometric for the verification process. In addition, several
cancelable biometric methods depend on encryption algorithms.
One of the methods depends on encrypted multimodal biometrics was introduced in Tarek et al. [5].
They presented an image-based multimodal biometric authentication scheme that utilizes the DRPE. In
the enrollment, they encrypt the fingerprint image using DRPE and a palm-print image as a secret key for
the encryption algorithm. At the authentication, the user is considered to be authorized if the encrypted
fingerprint can be successfully decrypted by the palm-print image from the same user. Then, the
decrypted image is matched against a fresh fingerprint image. In addition, another scheme based on
utilizing DRPE for cancelable face and iris recognition systems was presented by Soliman et al. [6]. They
used the scale-invariant feature transform to extract the face image features, which are encrypted using
the DRPE algorithm. For the iris recognition, the features from two iris images of the same person are
extrcated. One of the two iris images is encrypted with the DRPE, and the other is used to generate the
second phase mask used in the DRPE.
Also, Rachapalli et al. [7] presented a cancelable biometric cryptosystem using color QR codes. Their
system depends on key generation, free registration, and works with a conventional matcher. They proposed
a system that takes the multimodal biometric fused templates for texture, shape, and color classification
as input to the cipher data conversion module to generate the color QR code image. Sudhakar
et al. depended on steganography in cancelable iris recognition, where a cross-folded iris is embedded
into a generated QR code. The verification process is investigated using deep learning by implementing
the multilayer perceptron architecture for user recognition [8]. Another multimodal cancelable
biometric system was proposed by Tarif et al. [9]. It depends on digital encryption and hiding techniques.
It aims to achieve secure transmission of multimodal biometric information in the identification system.
The method adopts face, iris, and fingerprint biometrics. It factorizes the fingerprint and iris images,
separately, and then embeds them in the host Slantlet Transform Singular Values (SLT-SVs) of the face
image.
Yang et al. [10] worked on an access control system for a critical infrastructure. Fingerprint and face
images are the considered biometrics. They introduced two cascaded encryption layers: the core and the
expendable layers. The non-invertible transformation key and face feature set are merged together by
utilizing the fuzzy commitment. Abouelazm et al. [11] presented a multimodal cancelable biometric
scheme, which adopts optical encryption and the 3D jigsaw transform. Face and fingerprint are the
considered biometrics. The algorithm adopts a single random phase mask with the Fractional Fourier
Transform (FRFT). It depends on utilizing two stages of the 2D-FRFT separated with kernels in both
dimensions and a random phase mask.
The comb filter has been used to generate cancelable speaker templates by Kareem et al. The multiple
nulls in comb filter are used to induce intentional distortion in the speech signals [12]. Barrero et al.
introduced a multi-biometric template protection scheme based on the Bloom filter. The introduced
method estimates the main parameters of the different biometrics. Based on these estimations, a new
weighted feature level fusion scheme of Bloom-filter-based templates was introduced in [13].
Moreover, Mostafa et al. [14] presented encrypted cancelable templates that can be checked based on
correlation estimation. Ouda et al. used an extended bio-encoding algorithm to generate cancelable
templates of iris images. This type of cryptosystem depends on key binding. The system treats two
problems of cancelable biometrics: accuracy preservation, non-invertibility [15]. Another encryption-
based algorithm for cancelable biometric generation was introduced by Alarifi et al. [16]. An a symmetric
cryptography algorithm was implemented based on optical Phase Truncated Fourier Transform (PTFT).
The ciphering key is completely different from the deciphering key. Each of them is obtained through
90 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

two different random independent phase operations. The phase truncation in Fourier transform is used to
obtain the cancelable biometrics.
Kim et al. implemented a cancelable ECG biometric algorithm for identity verification. The cancelable
ECG templates are obtained by deriving the generalized likelihood ratio test from a composite hypothesis
testing in the compressive sensing domain [17]. Kaur et al. used a random distance metric to generate the
cancelable biometric templates. The extracted feature vector is represented as a point in the Cartesian
coordinates. The matching process is investigated through the feature vector distance from a random
point. If the distance between two feature vectors is small, then the feature vectors will belong to the
same user [18]. Chee et al. investigated the projection method to obtain the cancelable templates.
Random Binary Orthogonal Matrices Projection (RBOMP) hashing was the method used to project the
biometric features to an ordinal space using binary orthogonal matrices. The authors also implemented
Prime Factorization (PF) features to enhance security and privacy [19].
Another trend depends on using neural networks for face recognition and authentication. It was
proposed by Abdellatef et al. [20] and Jang et al. [21]. Abdellatef et al. [20] extract the deep features
from different facial regions by multiple Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). They adopted a CNN
architecture that has the advantages of depth concatenation, batch normalization, and residual learning.
They adopted a region-based technique that depends on detecting faces, eyes, nose, and mouth regions
from the original face images. Deep features of each region are extracted using multiple CNNs. Then, a
fusion network merges these features. Finally, bio-convolving encryption is implemented on the final
facial descriptors to obtain the cancelable biometric templates. Jang et al. [21] also exploited a CNN for
cancelable biometric generation. They proposed a Deep Table-based Hashing (DTH) algorithm, which is
based on CNN-based feature encoding into binary codes using the index of the hashing table. To train the
CNN, they proposed a segment-clustering loss and a pairwise Hamming loss with two classification
losses. The final authentication results were obtained by voting on the outcome of the retrieval system.
Most of the previous work implemented biometric images such as fingerprints, palm print, and iris,
while ignoring the voice-print which is a biometric that can be considered in system access. Nevertheless,
the researches that considered the voice-print used traditional methods of encryption to obtain the
cancelable templates. Reusability, diversity, non-invertibility and high performance are the four
characteristics of cancelable biometrics algorithms. It is difficult for an algorithm to achieve the four
characteristics at the same time. In this paper, a new and efficient encryption algorithm is implemented to
encrypted the voice-prints and obtain the cancelable templates. Two cascaded optical encryption
algorithms are implemented, OSH followed by DRPE, to encrypt voice-print spectrograms. Non-
invertibility and high performance are two characteristics of the cancelable biometrics obtained with the
proposed algorithm.

3 Optical Scanning Holography Algorithm

In 1948, light intensity and pahse have been recorded on films by Denis Gabor. This method is known as
holography. The hologram illumination is a reproduction of the original 3-D wave field. In 1979, this
hologram was recorded using a heterodyne system to be stored digitally on the computer. This process is
called Optical Scanning Holography (OSH), and it was invented by Poon et al. [22].
The OSH physical architecture is shown in Fig. 1. It includes a photodetector, a heterodyne system, a
lens, and a Band-Pass Filter (BPF). The OSH working theory depends on the object transparency scanning.
The transparency carries all object information. An optical beam scans out the transparency. The
photodetector receives all light and converts it to an electrical holography output, which can be displayed
on the monitor or stored on the computer. The OSH transfers the outcome optical information into an
electrical signal [23]. In this paper, speech signal spectrogram is encrypted using the OSH algorithm. The
OSH algorithm is adopted using its software rather than its physical structure.
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 91

Thick specimen on x-y

scanning platform
Plane wave at
+ Len PD
Point
source at

BPF Tuned
cos t at

×
LPF

LPF

×
PC/Monitor sin t

Figure 1: Architecture of the OSH [24]

Mathematically, the OSH can be explained as follows. At the beginning, we assume that the scanned
optical beam complex field is represented by Φb ði; jÞ and the scanned object transparency is represented
by T o ði0 ; j0 Þ at the point ði0 ; j0 Þ. Then, the complex field at the photodetector can be represented by
T o ði0 ; j0 ÞΦb ði0  i; j0  jÞ: Because of the transitional nature of transparency, there are shifts in the
coordinates of the complex field as Φb ði0  i; j0  jÞ. The electrical current output from the photodetector
can be represented by the spatial integration of the light intensity over the active area R of the detector
jΦb ði0  i; j0  jÞT o ði0 :j0 Þj2 . Then, the resultant current can be stored or displayed in a 2D format as follows:
ZZ
cði; jÞ / jT o ði0 ; j0 ÞΦb ði0  i; j0  jÞj2 di0 dj0 (1)
R

The scanning beam instantaneous position can be represented by iðtÞ and j(t), where the scanning beam
velocity can be represented by i(t) = j(t) = vt. Eq. (1) can be denoted in 2D convolution as follows:
cði; jÞ ¼ jΦb ði; jÞj2  jT o ði; jÞj2 (2)
The object T o ði; jÞ initially may be complex. The object intensity, jT o ði; jÞj2 is processed by a real and
non-negative quantity, |Φb(i, j)|2 [23].
In order to perform a 3-D imaging, phase information of light must not change. During 3D recording, it
is not allowed to process any phase information. To solve this problem, the heterogeneous optical scanning is
used. A time-dependent Fresnel Zone Plate (FZP), which depends on the superposition of a spherical wave
and a plane wave with different temporal frequencies, is used. At the top of Fig. 1, the sent light is collected
by the lens to be directed to the photodetector. We assume that there is a distance k between the spot of the
focusing laser beam, which generates the spherical wave and the transparency of the object To(i, j; k). At the
transparency, the scanning beam pattern can be defined as:
 
Izo b Izo 2
Φb ði:j; kÞ ¼ a exp½Iðx0 þ xÞt þ exp ði þ j Þ expðIx0 tÞ
2
(3)
2pk 2k

where a is the plane wave amplitude on the film, b is the amplitude of the point source, zo ¼ 2p=; xo and
xo þ x are the spherical and the plane wave frequencies, respectively. Then, Eq. (1) can describe the
generated current from the photodetector:
ZZ
cði; jÞ ¼ jT o ði0 :j0 ; kÞΦb ði0  i; j0  j; kÞj2 di0 dj0 (4)
R
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By substituting Eq. (3) into Eq. (4) and keeping the heterodyne current by using a BPF tuned at the
heterodyne frequency x, we have
zo h zo i
cx ði; jÞ ¼ ab sin xt þ ði2 þ j2 Þ  jT o ði:j; kÞj2 (5)
pk 2k
From Eq. (5), the optical transfer function OTF can be obtained as follows:
OTFði; j; kÞ ¼ fftfcx ði; j; kÞg=fftfjT o ði; j; kÞj2 g (6)
The heterodyne current frequency can represent the object information. This information can be
obtained though an electronic mixture of sine and cosine functions at the heterodyne frequency to obtain
the in-phase and the quadrature components of the heterodyne current, respectively.
abzo n h zo 2 2 i h zo i o
cx ðx:yÞ  sin xt ¼ cos ði þ j Þ  jT o ði:j; kÞj2  cos 2xt þ ði2 þ j2 Þ  jT o ðx:y; zÞj2 (7)
2pk 2k 2k
Applying an electronic Low Pass Filter (LPF), the hologram of the cosine FZP Gcos(i, j) can be obtained:
zo n h zo 2 i o
cs ði; jÞ / Gcos ði; jÞ ¼ cos ði þ j2 Þ  jT o ði:j; kÞj2 (8)
2pk 2k
Similarly, the sine FZP hologram after LPF Gcos(x.y) can be obtained:
zo n h zo 2 i o
cc ði; jÞ / Gsin ði; jÞ ¼ sin ði þ j2 Þ  jT o ði; j; kÞj2 (9)
2pk 2k
Then, holograms can be obtained as follows:
Z
zo n h zo 2 i o
Gcos ði; jÞ ¼ cos ði þ j2 Þ  jT o ði; j; kÞj2 dk (10a)
2pk 2k
Z
zo n h zo 2 i o
Gsin ði; jÞ ¼ sin ði þ j2 Þ  jT o ði; j; kÞj2 dk (10b)
2pk 2k
Eq. (10) can be rewritten as follows giving the OTF:
Gcos ði; jÞ ¼ Imb fft 1 f fftfCði; jÞgOTFosh ði; j; kÞgc (11a)
Gsin ði; jÞ ¼ Reb fft 1 f fftfCði; jÞgOTFosh ði; j; kÞgc (11b)
The reconstructed complex FZP hologram Gcompelx(i, j) can be obtained by Eq. (12).
Gcomplex ði; jÞ ¼ Gsin ði; jÞ þ jGcos ði; jÞ
(12)
¼ fft 1 f fftfCði; jÞgOTFosh ði; j; kÞg

The reconstructed image can be obtained by convolving any of the above holograms with the spatial
impulse response g(i, j, k) as in the following equation:
Gði; jÞgði; j; kÞ (13)
Finally, we adopt the inverse fft−1 to reconstruct the image as follows:
Reconstructed real image a fft1 f fftfGði; jÞgGði; j; kÞg
(14)
¼ fft 1 f fftfGði; jÞgOTFosh ði; j; kÞg
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 93

The OSH MATLAB program and its flowchart are indicated in detail in [25,26]. In this paper, the OSH is
implemented using its software not the physical structure.

4 Double Random Phase Encoding (DRPE) Algorithm

The DRPE was presented first in 1995 by Refregier and Javidi. It is one of the most popular optical
encryption schemes. This is due to its applicability using an optical system or a software. DRPE is based
on the modification of the spectral distribution of the image. The optical system of the DRPE algorithm is
illustrated in Fig. 2. It consists of two cascaded lenses with a Fourier Transform (FT) plane between
them, two image planes, one for the input and the other for the output. They are all separated by focal
length f to make the total separation distance as 4f as shown in Fig. 2. Hence, the DRPE system is known
as a 4f system [27]. Two random phase masks are applied (RPM1 and RPM2). One is applied at the input
plane, and the other is applied on the FT plane in order to increase the security level. An inverse FT is
applied through the second lens to obtain the encrypted image in the spatial domain.
The encryption process with the DRPE algorithm can be represented mathematically as follows:

Input plane FT plane Output plane

(RPM1) (RPM1) encrypted image Sen

Original
image
S( , )
Laser
beam f f f f

Figure 2: Optical DRPE system [27]

S en ¼ fSði; jÞ u1 ði; jÞg  fft 1 fu2 ði; jÞg (15)

where Sði; jÞ and Sen are the original image and the encrypted image in the spatial domain, respectively.
u1 ði; jÞ and u2 ði; jÞ are the two random phase masks RPM1 and RPM2, respectively.
RPM1 and RPM2 are 2D matrices of the same size as the original image Sði; jÞ. Their values are
distributed uniformly between 0 and 2π. RPM1 and RPM2 are generated using one of the different
random distributions such as uniform and Gaussian distributions [28] for efficient encryption of images.

5 Proposed Algorithm
This paper introduces a proposed algorithm for cancelable biometric recognition. Speech signal is
considered to be the used biometric in this paper. The proposed algorithm depends on speech
spectrogram encryption, and two cascaded optical encryption algorithms, which are OSH and DRPE. The
spectrogram is a 3D representation of the signal amplitude with time and frequency. Spectrogram can be
obtained by implementing the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of the signal. Then, the signal is
segmented into fixed-length frames. After that, a small overlapped window is applied. The spectrogram is
usually obtained as an image with color or brightness representing the varying amplitude with frequencies
on the vertical axis and time instants on the horizontal axis [29].
94 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

This paper introduces two optical encryption algorithms with software and mathematics explained in
Sections 3 and 4 rather than the optical setup. First, the spectrogram image is encrypted by the OSH
software. Then, the OSH encrypted spectrogram is encrypted again by the DRPE software with its two
randomly generated RPMs to increase the security level. The proposed algorithm has two phases: the
enrollment phase, and the verification phase as shown in Fig. 3. The enrollment phase can be explained
as follows:

Enrollment

OSH
Speech signal encryption
spectrogram
(2-D image s) Real part
sine-FZP
hologram
Fourier Hologram Reconstruct the _
Transform recording complex-FZP
Imaginary part hologram
cosine-FZP
hologram
Creating
OTFOSH

DRPE
encryption
Inverse
Fourier Fourier
Transform Transform
Application
database
RPM1 RPM2
( , ) ( , )

Verification

Test speech signal Correlation

spectrogram (2-D estimation
image S test )

OSH DRPE _ Cancelable

encryption encryption biometric

Decision T resholding

Figure 3: Cancelable verification system

1) The speech signal is transformed into spectrogram image s.

2) The spectrogram is encrypted using OSH software that begins with creating the OTFOSH through the
equation:
z
OTFOSH ¼ exp½j ðk 2 þ kj2 Þ (16)
2k0 i
where ki and kj are the spatial frequencies.
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 95

3) The FT is applied to image s.

S ¼ fftðsÞ (17)
4) The hologram FH is recorded in the frequency domain by the equation:
FH ¼ S  OTFOSH (18)
5) The real part sine-FZP hologram and the imaginary part cosine-FZP hologram are obtained.
Gsin ði; jÞ ¼ Re½ fft 1 f fftfSði; jÞgOTFOSH ðki ; kj ; k0 Þg (19)
Gcos ði; jÞ ¼ Im½ fft 1 f fftfSði; jÞgOTFOSH ðki ; kj ; k0 Þg (20)

6) The reconstructed encrypted image S OSH en is obtained by reconstructing the complex FZP
hologram Gc ði; jÞ.
Gc ði; jÞ ¼ Gsin ði; jÞ þ jGcos ði; jÞ (21)
S OSH en ¼ Gc ði; jÞ ¼ fft 1 f fftfSði; jÞgOTFOSH ði; j; k0 Þg (22)

7) The OSH encrypted spectrogram S OSH en is encrypted again by DRPE software as follows.
8) The two random phase RPM1 and RPM2 known as u1 ði; jÞ and u2 ði; jÞ are generated. At the end,
the encrypted spectrogram can be given by the equation:
S en ¼ fS OSHen ði; jÞ u1 ði; jÞg  fft 1 fu2 ði; jÞg (23)

where u1 ði; jÞ and u2 ði; jÞ are 2D matrices of the same size as that of the OSH encrypted spectrogram S OSH en :
In the verification phase, the cancelable biometric template of the test user is obtained using the same
steps in the enrollment. Then, the stored and test templates are 1:1 matched. After the matching process,
the resultant correlation value between the two templates is compared with a threshold value to give the
decision. The verification stage is, in fact, a thresholding task. The threshold is determined at the
intersection point of correlation distributions for genuine and imposter users. First of all, several genuine
tests are performed, and the correlation score is treated as a random variable. The Probability Distribution
Function (PDF) of the genuine score is estimated. Similarly, several tests are performed for imposter
users, and the correlation scores are recorded. The PDFs of these correlation scores of imposter test are
estimated. The intersection point between both PDFs is estimated, and hence the threshold value is
evaluated. Correlation value can be estimated through the following equation:
Pm
l¼1 ðxl  EðxÞÞðyl  EðyÞÞ
cr ¼ qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Pm 2 qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Pm 2 (24)
l¼1 xl  EðxÞ Þ l¼1 yl  EðyÞ Þ

where cr is the correlation value, xl and yl are the values of lth pixel intensity of the stored and test templates,
respectively. EðxÞ and EðyÞ are the values of stored and test templates mean intensity [30].

6 Experimental Results
This section displays the proposed algorithm results with some discussions. An Intel 2.5 GHz processor
that has a 6.00 GB RAM has been used in simulation with MATLAB R2016b. Sample speech signals have
been captured from the MIT dataset to be used in the simulation experiments.
The proposed algorithm depends on two levels of security to generate cancelable templates from speech
signals. The speech signal spectrogram is encrypted with two cascaded optical encryption algorithms. The
OSH and the DRPE are the two implemented optical encryption algorithms. The verification process is
96 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

performed on the encrypted cancelable templates, which means that the test biometric is checked, while it is
encrypted. The verification process depends on the correlation value between the enrolled and test
biometrics. If the correlation value is larger than a threshold, the user is considered as an authorized user.
The threshold value is determined from correlation distributions of genuine and impostor curves as the
intermediate point between the two curves.
Several evaluation metrics are adopted to evaluate the proposed system. The Receiver Operator
Characteristic (ROC) curve and the distributions of genuine and impostor tests are obtained from the
simulation experiments. In addition, the Area under the ROC curve (AROC), Equal Error Rate (EER),
False Accept Rate (FAR), and False Reject Rate (FRR) are calculated to evaluate the performance efficiency.
The ROC curve is a plot of False Positive Rate (FPR) versus True Positive Rate (TPR). The FPR is the
number of false positives to the total number of negatives, and TPR is the number of true positives to the total
number of positives. The point at which FAR and FRR are equal is the EER value. Both FAR and FRR
represent the probability of wrong decisions, where FAR defines imposter cases classified as genuine cases and
FRR defines genuine cases classified as imposter cases. The closer the EER value to zero is, the higher the
accuracy of the security system. The closer the value of AROC to one is, the higher the system efficiency [31–33].
Displayed results start with the numerical results of the evaluation metrics, which are given in Tab. 1 in noise
scenarios with variances of 0.01, 0.02, 0.03, and 0.04. The table gives the EER, AROC, FAR, FRR, and processing
time values. The table compares the two security levels. The first depends on the OSH encryption algorithm, and the
second depends on a cascaded structure of OSH and DRPE encryption algorithms. It is clear from the table that the
cascaded encryption of two stages gives better results than the those of the OSH, only. For the cascaded encryption,
EER values are close to zero indicating a good performance of the proposed algorithm. From the table, the AROC
value is one in the case of cascaded stages, which indicates a high accuracy of the cancelable biometric recognition
algorithm to distinguish between genuine and imposter cases.

Table 1: Different evaluation metric values and the processing times at different values of the noise variance
and zero mean for the proposed algorithm
Performance metrics/Algorithm AWGN variance
0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04
EER First level of security (OSH) 3.23 × 10−07 3.23 × 10−07 3.23 × 10−07 3.23 × 10−07
Second level of security 7.9 × 10−020 1.63 × 10−30 3.66 × 10−43 2.78 × 10−55
(OSH and DRPE)
FAR First level of security (OSH) 6.468 × 10−07 6.468 × 10−07 6.46 × 10−07 6.46 × 10−07
Second level of security 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
(OSH and DRPE)
FRR First level of security (OSH) 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
Second level of security 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.0000
(OSH and DRPE)
AROC First level of security (OSH) 0.3261 0.0501 0.0500 0.0500
Second level of security 1 1 1 1
(OSH and DRPE)
T (Sec) First level of security (OSH) 2.467 2.447 2.446 2.465
Second level of security 3.483 3.540 3.444 3.230
(OSH and DRPE)
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 97

Fig. 4a shows nine random versions of speech signals existing in the database. Fig. 4b shows the speech
signal spectrograms. Figs. 4c and 4d show the OSH and cascaded structure encrypted spectrograms,
respectively. The genuine and impostor distributions are shown in Fig. 5. It is obvious from the figure
that the proposed algorithm has a good performance, where there is an enough distance between the
distribution curves to distinguish the genuine and imposter ones. The ROC curves in the presence of
different noise variance values are shown in Fig. 6. From these curves, it is obvious that the performance
of the proposed algorithm is good with AROC values close to one.
Tab. 2 gives the average EER values for the proposed algorithm compared to those of the algorithms
given in Refs. [8,10,11,16,19]. It is clear from the table that the proposed algorithm gives low EER
values, which means a good performance.

Figure 4: Speech biometrics, spectrograms, and encrypted versions. (a) Nine random original speech
waveforms from the used databases. (b) Spectrograms. (c) OSH encrypted spectrograms. (d) Encryption
spectrograms using the cascaded encryption algorithm
98 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

Figure 5: Genuine and impostor distributions in noisy scenarios with zero mean and different variance
values. (a) 0.01, (b) 0.02, (c) 0.03 and (d) 0.04
CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1 99

Figure 6: ROC curves in noisy scenarios with zero mean and different variance values. (a) 0.01, (b) 0.02,
(c) 0.03 and (d) 0.04
100 CSSE, 2022, vol.43, no.1

Table 2: Average EER values of the proposed cancelable algorithm and the previous cancelable
biometric algorithms in [8,10,11,16,19]
Cancelable algorithm EER
Proposed 1.9750 × 10-20
Ref. [8] 0.04
Ref. [10] 0.002
Ref. [11] 9.3997 × 10-15
Ref. [16] 0.0019
Ref. [19] 0.0016

7 Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Work

This paper presented a robust proposed algorithm for cancelable biometric verification. The proposed
algorithm adopts two cascaded encryption stages. The speech signal is the proposed algorithm input.
First, the speech signal is transformed into its spectrogram. Next, the spectrogram is encrypted using
OSH. Finally, the OSH spectrogram is encrypted again using DRPE with two randomly generated RPMs
to get the cancelable templates. To verify the authorized users access, the correlation between the two
cancelable templates of the stored and test users is estimated and compared with a threshold value. The
two encryption stages are adopted using their software implementation in MATLAB. The proposed
algorithm can generate non-invertible cancelable templates and high efficiency even with noise. This is
clear from the evaluation metric values. The proposed algorithm achieves a trade-off between the two
requirements of cancelable biometric systems with a high level of security and high verification
performance. In the future work, we will work on iris images to generate RPMs for DRPE encryption.
Deep learning can be exploited in feature extraction from spectrograms, training, and testing although it
needs a large dataset and resources with high capabilities.

Acknowledgement: The authors would like to acknowledge the support received from Taif University
Researchers Supporting Project Number (TURSP-2020/147), Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia.

Funding Statement: This work was funded and supported by the Taif University Researchers Supporting
Project Number (TURSP-2020/147), Taif University, Taif, Saudi Arabia.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to report regarding the
present study.

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