VoIP Call Identification via a Dual-Level 1D-CNN With Frame and Utterance Features

Abstract

The increasing use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology in telecom fraud has become a serious global concern. Its ability to spoof caller IDs and IP addresses, and the use of overseas or anonymized servers make VoIP-based scams difficult to trace and regulate. As a result, distinguishing VoIP calls from conventional mobile phone calls based on voice signal characteristics is crucial for enhancing anti-fraud measures. However, existing forensic techniques often struggle to accurately identify speech transmitted via VoIP. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-level 1D-CNN that leverages both frame and utterance features for effective VoIP detection. After evaluating a range of acoustic features, we primarily focus on short-frame Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) due to their effectiveness in capturing VoIP characteristics. Given the frame-based processing and transmission nature of VoIP, we employ a 1D-CNN, rather than the more commonly used 2D-CNN that treats spectrograms as image, to extract frame-level codec features. Finally, we propose a dual-level classification strategy: the frame-level classifier captures encoding discrepancies within individual frames, while the utterance-level classifier aggregates these frame-level features to learn global encoding patterns through global covariance pooling. Experimental results on the VoIP Phone Call Identification Database (VPCID) demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing approaches, delivering superior accuracy and robustness across a wide range of challenging scenarios. Moreover, comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness and rationale behind the design of the proposed model architecture.