Voice biometrics: 3 benefits for crime prevention and investigative activities

Voice biometrics is an increasingly used tool in the field of security for crime prevention and investigative activities.

Each person’s voice has unique characteristics related to physiological qualities that define its frequencies. This is why it can be used for biometric identification, offering useful solutions to governments, the armed forces and law enforcement agencies.

We covered the topic extensively in the article “Audio Recognition: a new horizon for public safety and forensic investigation“. In this we are going to summarize the 3 fundamental advantages.

ADVANTAGE N ° 1: Identification through voice biometrics

In the past, the recognition of a person from the voice depended on the knowledge and memory of the forensic or investigator. In recent years, enormous progress has been made in the field of neural networks. This has allowed the development of more accurate voice biometric algorithms and of great help to law enforcement.

Audio Recognition software offers the ability to match a person’s identity from audio content collected from any type of channel. By comparing the data collected with those in the library or “bank of voices”, they go back to the identity of the person, as long as it is present in the database. Furthermore, the results of the Audio Recognition software are recognized as valid evidence in the courts.

In short, we can confidently state how many steps forward have been made and what incredible help this technology offers, both in the strategic and tactical fields.

ADVANTAGE N ° 2: speed and efficiency of Audio Recognition

With the Audio Recognition software it is possible to carry out the biometric voice analysis on a large scale and in a few minutes. This creates faster and more efficient workflows. In fact, this technology avoids using human resources in activities of little added value, returning high quality results that the same resources can use.

Furthermore, these softwares are able to “clean” the audio by removing the background noise that disturbs the sound of the voice and makes it incomprehensible to the human ear. Thus, it returns clean audio and classified data.

ADVANTAGE N ° 3: additional information starting from voice biometrics

Voice biometrics analysis can provide additional information, in addition to the speaker’s identity. For example, it can estimate the age, gender and language of the person. Let’s think about the case in which the entry is not present in the database. It will not be possible to recognize the speaker, but we can still obtain very useful clues for the investigation.

The added value of Pragma Etimos

Polyphonic is the Audio Recognition solution by Pragma Etimos, an innovative scale-up operating in the Data Intelligence and Green Data sector. The software deals with the collection and analysis of sounds and subsequent classification for the identification of human voices and background noises.

This occurs through the identification of the Audiome: sum of Audiosomes that make up the voice / sound imprint. The latter are the unique identifier that helps to compose the imprint of a sound and is given by the frequencies of the sound itself.

Each Audioma identified by Polyphonic it can be the set of two different types of Audiosomes:

• Human audiosome that recognizes who the voice belongs to, and various characteristics.
• Background noise audiosome that recognizes the environment (Airport, train station, bars, restaurants, construction sites, etc).

The real added value of Pragma Etimos consists in being able to connect these two types of Audiosomes. In fact, ambient sounds can be important clues to reconnect certain people to specific places.

In conclusion Polyphonic offers services of:

• Voice fingerprint identification
• Speaker Diarization
• Identification of the language
• Gender identification
• Estimate of age
• Voice activity detection
• Estimation of speech quality

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Public Safety & Audio Recognition