Forensic Science International: Synergy (Jan 2022)

Validations of an alpha version of the E3 Forensic Speech Science System (E3FS3) core software tools

  • Philip Weber,
  • Ewald Enzinger,
  • Beltrán Labrador,
  • Alicia Lozano-Díez,
  • Daniel Ramos,
  • Joaquín González-Rodríguez,
  • Geoffrey Stewart Morrison

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4
p. 100223

Abstract

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This paper reports on validations of an alpha version of the E3 Forensic Speech Science System (E3FS3) core software tools. This is an open-code human-supervised-automatic forensic-voice-comparison system based on x-vectors extracted using a type of Deep Neural Network (DNN) known as a Residual Network (ResNet). A benchmark validation was conducted using training and test data (forensic_eval_01) that have previously been used to assess the performance of multiple other forensic-voice-comparison systems. Performance equalled that of the best-performing system with previously published results for the forensic_eval_01 test set. The system was then validated using two different populations (male speakers of Australian English and female speakers of Australian English) under conditions reflecting those of a particular case to which it was to be applied. The conditions included three different sets of codecs applied to the questioned-speaker recordings (two mismatched with the set of codecs applied to the known-speaker recordings), and multiple different durations of questioned-speaker recordings. Validations were conducted and reported in accordance with the “Consensus on validation of forensic voice comparison”.

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