Application of electrical network frequency of digital recordings for location-stamp verification

Abstract

Electrical network frequency (ENF) is a signature of a power distribution grid. It represents the deviation from the nominal frequency (50 or 60 Hz) of a power system network. The variations in ENF sequences within a grid are subject to load fluctuations within that particular grid. These ENF variations are inherently located in a multimedia signal, which is recorded close to the grid or directly from the mains power line. Thus, the specific location of a recording can be identified by analyzing the ENF sequences of the multimedia signal in absence of the concurrent power signal. In this article, a novel approach to location-stamp authentication based on ENF sequences of digital recordings is presented. ENF patterns are extracted from a number of power and audio signals recorded in different grid locations across the world. The extracted ENF signals are decomposed into low outliers and high outliers frequency segments and potential feature vectors are determined for these ENF segments by statistical and signal processing analysis. Then, a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) classification model is developed to verify the location-stamp information of the recordings. The performance evaluations corroborate the efficacy of the proposed framework.