Easy, Interpretable, Effective: openSMILE for voice deepfake detection

In this paper, we demonstrate that attacks in the latest ASVspoof5 dataset-a de facto standard in the field of voice authenticity and deepfake detection-can be identified with surprising accuracy using a small subset of very simplistic features. These are derived from the openSMILE library, and are scalar-valued, easy to compute, and human interpretable. For example, attack A10's unvoiced segments have a mean length of 0.09 ± 0.02, while bona fide instances have a mean length of 0.18 ± 0.07. Using this feature alone, a threshold classifier achieves an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 10.3% for attack A10. Similarly, across all attacks, we achieve up to 0.8% EER, with an overall EER of 15.7 ±6.0%. We explore the generalization capabilities of these features and find that some of them transfer effectively between attacks, primarily when the attacks originate from similar Text-to-Speech (TTS) architectures. This finding may indicate that voice anti-spoofing is, in part, a problem of identifying and remembering signatures or fingerprints of individual TTS systems. This allows to better understand anti-spoofing models and their challenges in real-world application.