Detecting Audio Splicing: A Pointer Network Approach for Unconstrained Forensic Analysis

Core Concepts

SigPointer, a pointer network framework, can efficiently uncover splice locations in speech audio signals, outperforming existing methods on forensically challenging data.

Abstract

The paper proposes a novel approach called SigPointer for detecting and localizing audio splicing in speech recordings. Audio splicing, which involves deleting, copying, or inserting speech segments, is an effective way to manipulate audio evidence and poses a challenge for forensic analysts.
The key highlights are:

SigPointer treats audio splicing localization as a pointing task, where the neural network directly predicts the positions of splice points in the input signal. This is more natural and efficient than previous approaches that classify fixed-size segments or learn a mapping to a fixed vocabulary.

SigPointer is designed for continuous input signals, unlike existing pointer methods that operate on categorical data. It uses a Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with a pointer mechanism in the decoder.

Extensive experiments on forensically challenging data, including strongly compressed and noisy signals, show that SigPointer outperforms several baseline methods, including CNN-based and sequence-to-sequence Transformer models. The performance improvements range from 6 to 10 percentage points in Jaccard index and recall.

SigPointer demonstrates strong robustness to complex post-processing chains, such as multiple compression and real-world noise, outperforming the best existing model by 8-9 percentage points.

The proposed pointer framework allows SigPointer to have a much smaller model size compared to other methods, while still achieving superior performance.

Overall, SigPointer represents a significant advancement in audio splicing localization, providing a more natural and efficient solution for forensic analysts dealing with unconstrained audio data.

Stats

The dataset used for training and evaluation consists of speech audio samples with 0 to 5 splicing positions, subjected to various post-processing operations such as compression and additive noise.

Quotes

"Verifying the integrity of voice recording evidence for criminal investigations is an integral part of an audio forensic analyst's work."
"With powerful tools, either commercial or free, as for example Audacity [1], the hurdles for editing operations have become low."
"Forensic audio analysts are thus often assigned to verify the integrity of material relevant to court cases."

Key Insights Distilled From

Point to the Hidden: Exposing Speech Audio Splicing via Signal Pointer Nets

by Denise Mouss... at arxiv.org 05-06-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.05641.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the pointer mechanism in SigPointer be further extended or adapted to handle more complex audio manipulation scenarios, such as splicing across multiple speakers or splicing combined with voice conversion

The pointer mechanism in SigPointer can be extended or adapted to handle more complex audio manipulation scenarios by incorporating additional features and training strategies. To address splicing across multiple speakers, the model can be trained on datasets that include recordings from various speakers, allowing it to learn speaker-specific characteristics and patterns. By introducing speaker embeddings or speaker identification modules into the network architecture, SigPointer can potentially identify and localize splices across different speakers.
For scenarios involving splicing combined with voice conversion, the model can be enhanced to detect changes in voice characteristics such as pitch, timbre, and speaking style. By integrating voice conversion detection modules or leveraging techniques from voice conversion research, SigPointer can learn to differentiate between genuine voice variations and manipulated segments. Additionally, incorporating adversarial training or domain adaptation techniques can help the model generalize better to unseen voice conversion methods.

What other types of audio forensic tasks, beyond splicing localization, could benefit from a pointer-based approach, and how would the framework need to be modified to address those tasks

Other audio forensic tasks that could benefit from a pointer-based approach include audio tampering detection, speaker verification, and audio source identification. To adapt the framework for these tasks, modifications such as incorporating additional input modalities (e.g., spectrograms, MFCCs) or integrating domain-specific features (e.g., speaker embeddings, acoustic signatures) may be necessary.
For audio tampering detection, the model can be trained to identify various types of manipulations such as cutting, pasting, or overlaying audio segments. By incorporating attention mechanisms that focus on specific regions of the input signal, SigPointer can effectively pinpoint tampered areas.
In speaker verification tasks, the framework can be adjusted to compare and match voice characteristics for authentication purposes. By training the model on speaker-specific features and embeddings, SigPointer can learn to distinguish between different speakers and verify their identities based on voice patterns.
For audio source identification, the model can be trained on datasets containing diverse audio sources to learn to differentiate between different sound sources. By incorporating source-specific features and utilizing attention mechanisms to focus on unique audio signatures, SigPointer can accurately identify the origin of audio recordings.

Given the observed limitations of SigPointer's adaptation to signal lengths seen during training, how could the model be enhanced to better generalize to a wider range of input signal lengths without sacrificing performance

To enhance SigPointer's generalization to a wider range of input signal lengths without sacrificing performance, several strategies can be implemented. One approach is to incorporate dynamic input processing mechanisms that can adapt to varying signal lengths during inference. By introducing adaptive pooling layers or dynamic sequence length handling, the model can effectively process signals of different lengths without compromising accuracy.
Another method is to implement multi-scale processing within the network architecture, allowing SigPointer to capture both local and global dependencies in the input signal. By incorporating hierarchical attention mechanisms or multi-resolution feature extraction modules, the model can effectively analyze signals of varying lengths and complexities.
Furthermore, data augmentation techniques such as signal padding, cropping, or time warping can be utilized during training to expose the model to a diverse range of signal lengths. By augmenting the training data with signals of different durations, SigPointer can learn to adapt to varying input lengths and improve its robustness to unseen signal lengths during inference.