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An ENF-Based Audio Authenticity Method Robust to MP3 Compression

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Abstract

This work presents a novel method for assessing audio authenticity. Assuming that the electric network frequency is embedded in audio signals, the evaluation of audio integrity is carried out by detecting phase discontinuities. This is conducted by using causal and anti-causal filters, in order to avoid the mix of past and future phase information related to the time of analysis. This local phase change is then post-processed and thresholded to obtain the editing times. One remarkable property of the proposed method is its ability to withstand MP3 compression, an audio format widely used in practice. A more accurate evaluation metric is also introduced in this work. For that purpose, the databases used for evaluating the algorithm were automatically labeled indicating the editing times. The procedure to generate the ground truth is presented, as well as a discussion on the proposed metric. The performance of the technique presented promising results when evaluated on digitally edited and original audio signals.

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Notes

  1. http://speechpro-usa.com/product/forensic_analysis/editracker.

  2. The tolerance parameter \(\tau \) was chosen to avoid losing editing points. Our assumption is that the duration of a short word is at least 500 ms, so in the case of the insertion of short words, the value \(\tau =250\) ms permits an evaluation of the system’s performance without losing any editing point.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Pablo Zinemanas & Pablo Cancela

  2. L2S, Univ. Paris-Sud-CNRS-CentraleSupélec, Paris, France

    Magdalena Fuentes

  3. LTCI, Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France

    Magdalena Fuentes

  4. Programs of Electrical and Defense Engineering, Military Institute of Engineering (IME), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    José Antonio Apolinário Jr.

Authors
  1. Pablo Zinemanas
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  2. Magdalena Fuentes
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  3. Pablo Cancela
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  4. José Antonio Apolinário Jr.
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Correspondence to Pablo Zinemanas.

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Zinemanas, P., Fuentes, M., Cancela, P. et al. An ENF-Based Audio Authenticity Method Robust to MP3 Compression. Circuits Syst Signal Process 37, 4973–4992 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-018-0793-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-018-0793-9

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