NSF CIF: Nonintrusive Digital Speech Forensics: Source Identification and Content Authentication

Professor Carol Espy-Wilson (ECE/ISR) is the principal investigator for a three-year, $500K National Science Foundation grant, “Nonintrusive Digital Speech Forensics: Source Identification and Content Authentication.” With the advent of the digital era, virtually every speech communication system acquires, creates, transmits, stores, and processes information in digital form. Moreover, current digital media editing software allows malicious amateurs to perform imperceptible alterations to digital content. This creates a serious threat to the “knowledge life cycle.” When hearing is no longer believing, the process of going from data to information, knowledge, understanding and, finally, to decision or action is severely compromised. To help reduce this threat, Dr. Espy-Wilson will develop theories, methods and tools for extracting and visualizing evidence from digital speech content to identify the media source and authenticate content.