Participation of the Centre in the IAFPA 2026 International Conference in Trier

From 26 to 29 July 2026, the IAFPA 2026 international conference was held at Trier University in Germany, organized by the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics (IAFPA). The conference brought together experts, researchers and practitioners in the fields of forensic audio and speech analysis, forensic phonetics, speaker identification and related legal disciplines.

FOTO: FSC "Ivan Vučetić"

The Forensic Science Centre “Ivan Vučetić” was represented at the conference by a digital forensics expert, Sunčica Kuzmić.

As part of the oral programme, the results of the ENFSI FSAAWG international exercise in the field of audio enhancement were presented in a paper entitled “Insights from the ENFSI FSAAWG Collaborative Exercise on Audio Enhancement”. Sunčica Kuzmić participated in the preparation and presentation of the exercise results together with representatives of other European forensic institutions.

The exercise focused on comparing the approaches, methods and software tools used by forensic laboratories in audio enhancement. Particular attention was paid to speech intelligibility, the selection and sequence of processing procedures, and the impact of modern algorithms and artificial intelligence-based systems on the quality and reliability of the processed material. The exchange of results among laboratories is important for identifying good practices, developing common professional
guidelines, and ensuring the reproducibility and transparency of forensic procedures.

The conference programme covered a broad range of topics in forensic phonetics and acoustics. These included, among others, the identifiability and privacy protection of speech recordings, the impact of speaking styles and dialects on intelligibility and voice recognition, while a significant part of the programme was devoted to forensic speaker comparison. Research was presented on the use of likelihood ratios, automatic speaker recognition, the selection of appropriate reference populations, and the combination of automatic, acoustic-phonetic and auditory methods. Particular consideration was given to the combined application of speech enhancement and automatic speaker identification in forensic examinations.

A special expert session was dedicated to the role of expert witnesses in different legal systems. The session presented the experiences of experts appearing before German courts, their role in criminal proceedings within European legal systems, and the specific features of expert examination and expert testimony in the United States and the United Kingdom.

One of the central themes of the conference was synthetic and artificially generated voices, as well as the detection of deepfake audio recordings. Discussions addressed explainable linguistic and acoustic authentication methods, the distinction between original and computer-modified speech, the impact of voice conversion on the perception of speaker identity, and the potential use of automated systems for detecting manipulation. Particular emphasis was placed on the fact that legitimate AI-based audio processing may make it more difficult to classify a recording simply as “genuine” or “fake”, which requires a comprehensive forensic analysis of the circumstances in which the recording was created and processed.

The poster sessions included research on individual pronunciation characteristics, voice quality, phonetic and dialectal variation, speaker age estimation and speech transcription in the presence of noise, the development of forensic speech corpora, interlaboratory comparison exercises as well as methodologies for detecting synthetically generated speech.

Participation in the IAFPA 2026 conference enabled the direct exchange of knowledge and experience with leading international experts in forensic audio and speech analysis. The knowledge gained is particularly important in the context of the rapid development of artificial intelligence systems, synthetic speech and voice conversion technologies.

The presentation of the results of the international exercise confirms the Centre’s active participation in the development of European forensic practices and its commitment to continuous professional development, international cooperation and the application of scientifically grounded methods.
 

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