A Study of F0 Modification for X-Vector Based Speech Pseudonymization Across Gender
This work addresses privacy protection in speech technology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing VoicePrivacy challenge frameworks.
The study tackled speech pseudonymization by modifying fundamental frequency (F0) in x-vector systems, finding that F0 modification always improves performance, with gender affecting the gain.
Speech pseudonymization aims at altering a speech signal to map the identifiable personal characteristics of a given speaker to another identity. In other words, it aims to hide the source speaker identity while preserving the intelligibility of the spoken content. This study takes place in the VoicePrivacy 2020 challenge framework, where the baseline system performs pseudonymization by modifying x-vector information to match a target speaker while keeping the fundamental frequency (F0) unchanged. We propose to alter other paralin-guistic features, here F0, and analyze the impact of this modification across gender. We found that the proposed F0 modification always improves pseudonymization We observed that both source and target speaker genders affect the performance gain when modifying the F0.