Fighting Crime with Speaker Identification

Mumbai. A city that is truly vibrant. One that has embraced one and all... with a spirit that is exemplary for its resilience and optimism.
A city that today fights terrorism and opression surprisingly from internal sources as well as from foreign shores.. The spirit struggles to stay alive.
Its deeply distressing for us mumbaikars.
I wanted to share with all this interesting piece of information I stumbled upon which could well aid the support system and fight back.
Let us support this interesting piece of technology so that our country can protect itself better.

Fighting Crime with Speaker Identification

Finland police are harnessing the power of Speaker Identification Technology to fight terror and crime reports Helsingin Sanomat (10/11/2008). A speech database of wanted people will be available to police nationwide, and it will function similar to DNA and fingerprint databases currently available with the police. The system detects a person just on the basis of their voice from phone call or other recordings.

DNA and fingerprint matches help only post-facto and only after a suspect is in the bag, whereas speaker identification helps anytime a suspect uses a phone or leaves a voice record somewhere; clues can come before an actual strike. It can be of immense help to Intelligence Agencies in their efforts to detect planned acts of terror.

Terror operatives change devices and SIMs all the time, so it is hard to find who is behind a number at a given time. But voice fragments, snatched from any speech channel -phone, radio, Internet, etc. - can provide substantial leads immediately and automatically. This can guide pre-emption and investigation both.

Speech experts say that modern Speaker Identification technology can work with minimal training data and detect suspects in near real time. Clues to planned strikes can save innocent lives and speaker identification is a potent technology for obtaining these. It is heartening to note that such advanced technology is now available in India itself, a team of ex-IITians having developed it recently.

[source: http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200811/1227801208.html]