Strength of forensic speaker identification evidence: Multispeaker formant and cepstrum-based segmental discrimination with a Bayesian likelihood ratio as threshold

A forensic-phonetic speaker identification experiment is described which tests to what extent same-speaker pairs from a 60 speaker Japanese data base can be discriminated from different-speaker pairs using a Bayesian likelihood ratio (LR) as discriminant function. Non-contemporaneous telephone recordings are used, with comparison based on mean values from three segments only: a nasal, a voiceless fricative, and a vowel. It is shown that discrimination using the LR-based distance is better than with a conventional distance, and that the cepstrum outperforms the formants. A LR for the test of 50 is obtained for formant-based discrimination, compared to c. 900 for the cepstrum, and the tests are thus shown to be capable of yielding a probative strength of support for the prosecution hypothesis that is conventionally quantified as ‘moderate’ for formants but ‘moderately strong’ for the cepstrum. Comparisons are made with results from similar experiments