INTERPOL survey of the use of speaker identification by law enforcement agencies

Geoffrey Stewart Morrison; Farhan Hyder Sahito; Gaëlle Jardine; Djordje Djokic; Sophie Clavet; Sabine Berghs; Caroline Goemans Dorny

doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.03.044

INTERPOL survey of the use of speaker identification by law enforcement agencies

Forensic Sci Int. 2016 Jun:263:92-100. doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.03.044. Epub 2016 Apr 1.

Authors

Geoffrey Stewart Morrison¹, Farhan Hyder Sahito², Gaëlle Jardine¹, Djordje Djokic¹, Sophie Clavet¹, Sabine Berghs¹, Caroline Goemans Dorny¹

Affiliations

¹ Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France.
² Office of Legal Affairs, INTERPOL General Secretariat, 200 Quai Charles de Gaulle, 69006 Lyon, France. Electronic address: f.sahito@interpol.int.

PMID: 27100858
DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.03.044

Abstract

A survey was conducted of the use of speaker identification by law enforcement agencies around the world. A questionnaire was circulated to law enforcement agencies in the 190 member countries of INTERPOL. 91 responses were received from 69 countries. 44 respondents reported that they had speaker identification capabilities in house or via external laboratories. Half of these came from Europe. 28 respondents reported that they had databases of audio recordings of speakers. The clearest pattern in the responses was that of diversity. A variety of different approaches to speaker identification were used: The human-supervised-automatic approach was the most popular in North America, the auditory-acoustic-phonetic approach was the most popular in Europe, and the spectrographic/auditory-spectrographic approach was the most popular in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South and Central America. Globally, and in Europe, the most popular framework for reporting conclusions was identification/exclusion/inconclusive. In Europe, the second most popular framework was the use of verbal likelihood ratio scales.

Keywords: Forensic voice comparison; INTERPOL; Law enforcement; Speaker identification; Survey.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Biometric Identification / methods*
Biometric Identification / statistics & numerical data*
Databases, Factual
Government Agencies
Humans
Law Enforcement*
Phonetics
Sound Spectrography
Surveys and Questionnaires
Voice*