Using the ENF Criterion for Determining the Time of Recording of Short Digital Audio Recordings

The Electric Network Frequency (ENF) Criterion is a recently developed forensic technique for determining the time of recording of digital audio recordings, by matching the ENF pattern from a questioned recording with an ENF pattern database. In this paper we discuss its inherent limitations in the case of short --- i.e., less than 10 minutes in duration --- digital audio recordings. We also present a matching procedure based on the correlation coefficient, as a more robust alternative to squared error matching.