On the effect of amr and AMR-WB GSM compression on overlapped speech for forensic analysis

The recent ubiquity of mobile telephony has posed the challenge of forensic speech analysis on compressed speech content. Whilst existing research studies have investigated the effect of mobile speech compression on speaker and speech parameters, this paper addresses the effect of speech compression on parameters when an interfering background speaker is present in clean and noisy conditions. Preliminary evaluations presented in this paper study the effect of the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) and Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) speech coders on the Linear Prediction (LP) speech spectrum, Line Spectral Frequencies (LSFs), and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). Results indicate that due caution should be employed for the forensic analysis of mobile telephony speech: speech coder parameters are significantly degraded when an interfering speaker or noise is present, compared to parameters obtained from the main speaker alone. Moreover, at high SNR the speech parameters exhibit values that gradually transition from those ideally and independently obtained from the main speaker to those of the background speaker as the amplitude of the background interfering speaker increases.