Audio forensic examination

The field of audio forensics involves many topics familiar to the general audio digital signal processing (DSP) community, such as speech recognition, talker identification, and signal quality enhancement. There is potentially much to be gained by applying modern DSP theory to problems of interest to the forensics community, and this article is written to give the DSP audience some insight into the types of problems and challenges that face practitioners in audio forensic laboratories. However, this article must also present several of the frustrations and pitfalls encountered by signal processing experts when dealing with typical forensic material due to the standards and practices of the legal system.