Audio forensics from acoustic reverberation

Hafiz Malik, Hany Farid

Abstract: An audio recording is subject to a number of possible distortions and artifacts. For example, the persistence of sound, due to multiple reflections from various surfaces in a room, causes temporal and spectral smearing of the recorded sound. This distortion is referred to as audio reverberation time. We describe a technique to model and estimate the amount of reverberation in an audio recording. Because reverberation depends on the shape and composition of a room, differences in the estimated reverberation can be used in a forensic and ballistic setting.