Language-Independent Speaker Anonymization Approach using Self-Supervised Pre-Trained Models
This addresses privacy protection in speech processing across languages, but it is incremental as it builds on existing anonymization concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of speaker anonymization by proposing a simpler, language-independent method using self-supervised pre-trained models, achieving effectiveness on English and Mandarin datasets.
Speaker anonymization aims to protect the privacy of speakers while preserving spoken linguistic information from speech. Current mainstream neural network speaker anonymization systems are complicated, containing an F0 extractor, speaker encoder, automatic speech recognition acoustic model (ASR AM), speech synthesis acoustic model and speech waveform generation model. Moreover, as an ASR AM is language-dependent, trained on English data, it is hard to adapt it into another language. In this paper, we propose a simpler self-supervised learning (SSL)-based method for language-independent speaker anonymization without any explicit language-dependent model, which can be easily used for other languages. Extensive experiments were conducted on the VoicePrivacy Challenge 2020 datasets in English and AISHELL-3 datasets in Mandarin to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SSL-based language-independent speaker anonymization method.