Historical and Procedural Overview of Forensic Speaker Recognition as a Science

Abstract

Forensic phonetics and acoustics are nowadays widely used regarding police and legal use of acoustic samples. Among many tasks included in this area, forensic speaker recognition is considered as one of the most complex problems. Forensic speaker recognition, sometimes called forensic speaker comparison, is a process for making judgments on whether or not two speech samples are from the same speaker. This chapter introduces the historical backgrounds of forensic speaker recognition including “voiceprint” controversy, human-based visual and auditory forensic speaker recognition, and automatic forensic speaker recognition. Procedural considerations in forensic speaker recognition processes and factors that affect recognition performances are also presented. Finally, we will give a summary of the progress and developments made in the forensic automatic speaker recognition.