Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2607.27245

Enhancing Law-Enforcement Audio Transcription: A LoRA-Based Adaptation of Whisper for BWC Footage

Vivek Senthil·Zhiqiang Tao·Ernest Fokoué
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Modern policing faces a "visibility paradox" where law enforcement agencies possess petabytes of Body-Worn Camera (BWC) footage that remains largely unutilized for accountability or systemic review due to the prohibitive labor costs of manual transcription. This research presents a framework for adapting the OpenAI Whisper architecture to the unique acoustic and linguistic challenges of the policing environment. By employing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), we address the significant performance degradation observed in zero-shot models when confronted with high-stress scenarios, sirens, and radio interference. Crucially, we demonstrate that this adaptation is feasible on consumer-grade hardware (Acer Nitro local machine with NVIDIA 4GB GTX GPU) using 8-bit quantization and gradient checkpointing. We further integrate these transcriptions into a symbolic reasoning pipeline using a domain-specific ontology to transform raw audio into evidence-linked incident graphs, achieving a 93.7% lexicon mapping rate for the advancement of procedural justice and transparency.

Explore related subjects

cs.SDcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Vivek Senthil, Zhiqiang Tao, Ernest Fokoué. 2026-07-27. Enhancing Law-Enforcement Audio Transcription: A LoRA-Based Adaptation of Whisper for BWC Footage. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27245

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 Technical Report

Recently, large language model (LLM) based ASR models have achieved significant progress, yet they generally lack support for multi-speaker scenarios, where the cocktail party problem remains a critical bottleneck for further advancing ASR. Existing TS-ASR methods, including end-to-end architectures with speaker embeddings and latest LLM-based explorations suffer from degraded single-speaker performance and the inability to reject when the target speaker is absent. In this paper, we propose Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, an LLM-based end-to-end TS-ASR architecture. By utilizing reference speech as voiceprint prompts, it directly transcribes the target speaker's speech without requiring speech separation. Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 maintains competitive performance in single-speaker scenarios, comparable to mainstream ASR models. It also features a negative sample rejection capability, outputting empty text when the target speaker is absent from the mixed speech. Additionally, Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 supports a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mode to provide explicit reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on various synthetic and real-world multispeaker benchmarks demonstrate that Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the cocktail party problem through a unified architecture that balances multispeaker and single-speaker recognition accuracy, along with rejection capability.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

EConv-TasNet: Efficient Conv-TasNet for Effective Speech Separation

Conv-TasNet has served as a strong baseline for time-domain speech separation, and many studies have extended it with advanced architectures such as dual-path networks, U-Nets, and attention mechanisms. However, these methods often introduce high computational cost and complexity, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. To address this issue, we propose eConv-TasNet, an efficient variant of Conv-TasNet that improves both effectiveness and efficiency without relying on resource-intensive modules. The proposed model consists of a group-wise early-splitting (GES) module and a multi-group feature aggregation (MGFA) module. GES generates discriminative speaker embeddings at intermediate stages, while MGFA progressively aggregates these group-level representations for refined mask estimation. Experimental results show that eConv-TasNet reduces model size by 22.4%, accelerates inference by 18.9%, and improves SI-SNRi by 14.0%-28.0% across three public benchmarks. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and lower inference cost. These results demonstrate a favorable efficiency-effectiveness trade-off for edge deployment.

cs.SD↗