There are many reasons for writing a book; this one was conceived and devel oped mainly for two. First, a new area has emerged from within the forensic sciences-that of forensic phonetics. As with all new specialties, it is necessary to define it, identify its boundaries, justify its importance and compile a list of the elements it encompasses. This book attempts to outline these several rela tionships. Second, over the past decade I have become fascinated with forensics in general and the rapidly expanded subarea of forensic phonetics in particular. Admittedly, the latter field is one that is not as yet sufficiently appreciated-and much more needs to be known about its nature and extent. Yet, I have found it to be a most enjoyable area of study and my attempts to describe its domains were quite informative. It was especially interesting to struggle with the interfaces between forensic phonetics and related fields, and discover how they overlap. Only a few comments will be made about the book's contents here in the preface. For one thing, they are described in some detail in the first chapter.

A reference for professionals who work with recorded evidence, covering areas such authentication of speech recordings, voice stress analysis, and speaker identification. It covers the basic sciences behind voice identification. It also covers what the reader needs to know about coordinating 'ear witness' lineups.

Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity: A Case Study discusses the subject of forensic voice identification and speaker profiling. Specifically focusing on speaker profiling and using dialects of the Hindi language, widely used in India, the authors have contributed to the body of research on speaker identification by using accent feature as the discriminating factor. This case study contributes to the understanding of the speaker identification process in a situation where unknown speech samples are in different language/dialect than the recording of a suspect. The authors' data establishes that vowel quality, quantity, intonation and tone of a speaker as compared to Khariboli (standard Hindi) could be the potential features for identification of dialect accent.

This book is the result of the second NATO Advanced Study Institute on speech processing held at the Chateau de Bonas, France, from June 29th to July 10th, 1981. This Institute provided a high-level coverage of the fields of speech transmission, recognition and understanding, which constitute important areas where research activity has re cently been associated with actual industrial developments. This book will therefore include both fundamental and applied topics. Ten survey papers by some of the best specialists in the field are included. They give an up-to-date presentation of several important problems in automatic speech processing. As a consequence the book can be considered as a reference manual on some important areas of automatic speech processing. The surveys are indicated by 'a * in the table of contents. This book also contains research papers corresponding to original works, which were presented during the panel sessions of the Institute. For the sake of clarity the book has been divided into five sections : 1. Speech Analysis and Transmission: An emphasis has been laid on the techniques of linear prediction (LPC), and the problems involved in the transmission of speech at various bit rates are addressed in details. 2. Acoustics and Phonetics : One'of the major bottleneck in the development of speech recogni tion systems remains the transcription of the continuous speech wave into some discrete strings or lattices of phonetic symbols. Two survey papers discuss this problem from different points of view and several practical systems are also described.

With an A–Z format, this encyclopedia provides easy access to relevant information on all aspects of biometrics. It features approximately 250 overview entries and 800 definitional entries. Each entry includes a definition, key words, list of synonyms, list of related entries, illustration(s), applications, and a bibliography. Most entries include useful literature references providing the reader with a portal to more detailed information.