Rome Laboratory speech and audio processing technologies with applicability to law enforcement

Rome Laboratory, one of the United States Air Force's four Super Laboratories, has been designated by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to be its National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center for the Northeast (NLECTC-NE). A Department of Defense leader in research and development (R&D) in speech and audio processing for over 25 years, Rome Laboratory's main thrust in these R&D areas has focused on developing technology to improve the collection, handling, identification and intelligibility of communication signals. Rome Laboratory speech and audio technology is unique and particularly appropriate for application to law enforcement requirements because it addresses the military need for time critical decisions and actions, operating within noisy environments, and use by uncooperative speakers in tactical, real-time applications. Speech enhancement and speaker recognition are the primary technologies discussed in this paper. Automatic language and dialect identification, automatic gisting, spoken language translation, co-channel speaker separation and audio manipulation technologies are briefly discussed.