Acoustic Environment Identification and Its Applications to Audio Forensics

An audio recording is subject to a number of possible distortions and artifacts. Consider, for example, artifacts due to acoustic reverberation and background noise. The acoustic reverberation depends on the shape and the composition of a room, and it causes temporal and spectral smearing of the recorded sound. The background noise, on the other hand, depends on the secondary audio source activities present in the evidentiary recording. Extraction of acoustic cues from an audio recording is an important but challenging task. Temporal changes in the estimated reverberation and background noise can be used for dynamic acoustic environment identification (AEI), audio forensics, and ballistic settings. We describe a statistical technique to model and estimate the amount of reverberation and background noise variance in an audio recording. An energy-based voice activity detection method is proposed for automatic decaying-tail-selection from an audio recording. Effectiveness of the proposed method is tested using a data set consisting of speech recordings. The performance of the proposed method is also evaluated for both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent scenarios.