  The understanding and interpretation of speech can be affected by various
external factors. The use of face masks is one such factors that can create
obstruction to speech while communicating. This may lead to degradation of
speech processing and affect humans perceptually. Knowing whether a speaker
wears a mask may be useful for modeling speech for different applications. With
this motivation, finding whether a speaker wears face mask from a given speech
is included as a task in Computational Paralinguistics Evaluation (ComParE)
2020. We study novel acoustic features based on linear filterbanks,
instantaneous phase and long-term information that can capture the artifacts
for classification of speech with and without face mask. These acoustic
features are used along with the state-of-the-art baselines of ComParE
functionals, bag-of-audio-words, DeepSpectrum and auDeep features for ComParE
2020. The studies reveal the effectiveness of acoustic features, and their
score level fusion with the ComParE 2020 baselines leads to an unweighted
average recall of 73.50% on the test set.
