Likelihood ratio calibration in a transparent and testable forensic speaker recognition framework

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. D. Ramos, J. González-Rodríguez, J. Ortega-garcía, "Likelihood Ratio Calibration in a Transparent and Testable Forensic Speaker Recognition Framework " in The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, ODYSSEY, San Juan (Puerto Rico), 2006, 1 - 8A recently reopened debate about the infallibility of some classical forensic disciplines is leading to new requirements in forensic science. Standardization of procedures, proficiency testing, transparency in the scientific evaluation of the evidence and testability of the system and protocols are emphasized in order to guarantee the scientific objectivity of the procedures. Those ideas will be exploited in this paper in order to walk towards an appropriate framework for the use of forensic speaker recognition in courts. Evidence is interpreted using the Bayesian approach for the analysis of the evidence, as a scientific and logical methodology, in a two-stage approach based in the similarity-typicality pair, which facilitates the transparency in the process. The concept of calibration as a way of reporting reliable and accurate opinions is also deeply addressed, presenting experimental results which illustrate its effects. The testability of the system is then accomplished by the use of the NIST SRE 2005 evaluation protocol. Recently proposed application-independent evaluation techniques (Cllr and APE curves) are finally addressed as a proper way for presenting results of proficiency testing in courts, as these evaluation metrics clearly show the influence of calibration errors in the accuracy of the inferential decision processThis work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology under project TIC2003-09068-C02-01