A comparison of two acoustic methods for forensic speaker discrimination

A pilot forensic-phonetic experiment is described which compares the performance of formant- and cepstrally-based analyses on forensically realistic speech: intonationally varying tokens of the word hello said by six demonstrably similar-sounding speakers in recording sessions separated by at least a year. The two approaches are compared with respect to F-ratios and overall discrimination performance utilising a novel band-selective cepstral analysis. It is shown that at the second diphthongal target in hello the cepstrum-based analysis outperforms the formant analysis by about 5%, compared to its 10% superiority for same-session data.