Interest in voice biometrics grows

The name
of the West Palm Beach-based center - the National
Institute for Truth Verification (NITV) -may sound a bit Orwellian, but it
is doing important work. A little more than twenty years ago, some of the
best minds in voice biometrics began to develop the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA) based on the original technology, the Psychological Stress Evaluator.
Progress on the new forensic voice biometrics system was slow owing to the
stringent standards that the NITV used to validate
their technology. This approach paid off, however, as the CVSA is now relied
upon by thousands of law enforcement agencies, including most major
metropolitan police departments, and the U.S.
military. The automatic scoring algorithm used by the CVSA took ten years to
develop and is known as the Method for Quantifying Psychological Stress Levels
Using Voice Samples. It was recently awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent
 Office.

CVSA was introduced to a largely skeptical law
enforcement community in 1988. Law enforcement has been persuaded, and nearly 1,800
agencies have acquired the system, helping to solve tens of thousands of crimes
- many of which after having gone cold. The Special Forces’ successes in Iraq using
the CVSA to obtain actionable intelligence on the battlefield has drawn the
attention of William Shatner’s “Heartbeat of America Award,” given to
businesses that keep American strong.

In a study of the technology, funded by the
Department of Justice and conducted by a U.S. Air Force laboratory, the
researchers reported their findings to the 38th Hawaii International Conference
on System Sciences. The Air Force study found that the technology “is a viable
alternative to the polygraph.” Additionally, a “U.S. Special Operations Command
Independent Evaluation of the CVSA” found that “The majority of the agencies
preferred the CVSA to the polygraph.” It also found that most of those agencies
had discontinued the use of the polygraph.