Machine listening techniques as a complement to video image analysis in forensics

Video is now one of the major sources of information for forensics. However, video documents can be originating from various recording devices (CCTV, mobile devices, etc.) with inconsistent quality and can sometimes be recorded in challenging light or motion conditions. Therefore, the amount of information that can be extracted relying solely on video image can vary to a great extent. Most of the videos however generally include audio recording as well. Machine listening can then become a valuable complement to video image analysis in challenging scenarios. In this paper, the authors present a brief overview of some machine listening techniques and their application to the analysis of video documents for forensics. The applicability of these techniques to forensics problems is then discussed in the light of machine listening system performances.