Audio Splicing Detection and Localization Based on Acquisition Device Traces

In recent years, the multimedia forensic community has put a great effort in developing solutions to assess the integrity and authenticity of multimedia objects, focusing especially on manipulations applied by means of advanced deep learning techniques. However, in addition to complex forgeries as the deepfakes, very simple yet effective manipulation techniques not involving any use of state-of-the-art editing tools still exist and prove dangerous. This is the case of audio splicing for speech signals, i.e., to concatenate and combine multiple speech segments obtained from different recordings of a person in order to cast a new fake speech. Indeed, by simply adding a few words to an existing speech we can completely alter its meaning. In this work, we address the overlooked problem of detection and localization of audio splicing from different models of acquisition devices. Our goal is to determine whether an audio track under analysis is pristine, or it has been manipulated by splicing one or multiple segments obtained from different device models. Moreover, if a recording is detected as spliced, we identify where the modification has been introduced in the temporal dimension. The proposed method is based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that extracts model-specific features from the audio recording. After extracting the features, we determine whether there has been a manipulation through a clustering algorithm. Finally, we identify the point where the modification has been introduced through a distance-measuring technique. The proposed method allows to detect and localize multiple splicing points within a recording.