SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2203.16738

Improving speaker de-identification with functional data analysis of f0 trajectories

Abstract

Due to a constantly increasing amount of speech data that is stored in different types of databases, voice privacy has become a major concern. To respond to such concern, speech researchers have developed various methods for speaker de-identification. The state-of-the-art solutions utilize deep learning solutions which can be effective but might be unavailable or impractical to apply for, for example, under-resourced languages. Formant modification is a simpler, yet effective method for speaker de-identification which requires no training data. Still, remaining intonational patterns in formant-anonymized speech may contain speaker-dependent cues. This study introduces a novel speaker de-identification method, which, in addition to simple formant shifts, manipulates f0 trajectories based on functional data analysis. The proposed speaker de-identification method will conceal plausibly identifying pitch characteristics in a phonetically controllable manner and improve formant-based speaker de-identification up to 25%.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Lauri Tavi, Tomi Kinnunen, Rosa González Hautamäki. 2022-03-31. Improving speaker de-identification with functional data analysis of f0 trajectories. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2022.03.010

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

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

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

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