CEDAR Audio is proud to have been the platinum sponsor of the AES International Conference on Audio Forensics, held in Arlington, VA from 15 - 18 June 2017. One of the privileges of the platinum sponsor is to select the best paper presented over the three days, and adjudication was carried out by CEDAR's Engineering Director (and former chairman of the AES UK section) Dr Christopher Hicks.
"There were numerous interesting papers", said Dr Hicks, "but, for me, one of them stood out. This was 'Increasing the Temporal Resolution of ENF Analysis via Harmonic Distortion' by Luca Cuccovillo and Patrick Aichroth of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau, Germany." On being notified of the award by conference chairman Jeff Smith of the National Center for Media Forensics in Denver, Cuccovillo responded, "I can't explain how honoured I feel about this. Being selected for such an award is priceless for me, especially since CEDAR made the choice! Thank you very much."
The paper presented an approach for improved ENF (Electrical Network Frequency) analysis based on harmonic distortion and discussed the creation of artificial harmonics in order to increase its temporal resolution. This increase is of significant benefit in many cases when attempting to detect the editing of forensic audio recordings using ENF. The paper showed that including this approach into pre-existing tampering analysis methods also resulted in an immediate increase in precision.
CEDAR's Managing Director, Gordon Reid, added, "In my view, the various AES International Conferences are an important feature of the pro-audio calendar. They allow developers and practitioners to come together to discuss new approaches and discover the latest methods in each of their fields, so we are proud to have supported the forensic audio conferences since their inception in Denver in 2005, and to have been the Platinum Sponsor of the last two. We very much look forward to being involved with the next, which I believe will be in Europe in 2019."
See: 2017 AES International Conference on Audio Forensics
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