Adjustable deterministic pseudonymization of speech

While public speech resources become increasingly available, there is a growing interest to preserve the privacy of the speakers, through methods that anonymize the speaker information from speech while preserving the spoken linguistic content. In this paper, a method for pseudonymization (reversible anonymization) of speech is presented, that allows to obfuscate the speaker identity in untranscribed running speech. The approach manipulates the spectrotemporal structure of the speech to simulate a different length and structure of the vocal tract by modifying the formant locations, as well as by altering the pitch and speaking rate. The method is deterministic and partially reversible, and the changes are adjustable on a continuous scale. The method has been evaluated in terms of (i) ABX listening experiments, and (ii) automatic speaker verification and speech recognition. ABX experimental results indicate that the speaker identifiability among forced choice pairs reduced from over 90% to less than 70% through pseudonymization, and that de-pseudonymization was partially effective. An evaluation on the VoicePrivacy 2020 challenge data showed that the proposed approach performs better than the signal processing based baseline method that uses McAdams coefficient and performs slightly worse than the neural source filtering based baseline method. Further analysis showed that the proposed approach: (i) is comparable to the neural source filtering baseline based method in terms of phone posterior feature based objective intelligibility measure, (ii) preserves formant tracks better than the McAdams based method, and (iii) preserves paralinguistic aspects such as dysarthria in several speakers.

Reconnaissance et transformation de locuteurs

Dominique Genoud

This PhD thesis tries to understand how to analyse, decompose, model and transform the vocal identity of a human when seen through an automatic speaker recognition application. It starts with an introduction explaining the properties of the speech signal and the basis of the automatic speaker recognition. Then, the errors of an operating speaker recognition application are analysed. From the deficiencies and mistakes noticed in the running application, some observations cm be made which will imply a re-evaluation of the characteristic parameters of a speaker, and to reconsider some parts of the automatic speaker recognition chain. In order to determine what are the characterising parameters of a speaker, these are extracted from the speech signal with an analysis and synthesis harmonic plus noise model (H+N). The analysis and re-synthesis of the harmonic and noise parts indicate those which are speech or speaker dependent. It is then shown that the speaker discriminating information can be found in the residual of the subtraction from the original signal of the H+N modeled signal. Then, a study of the impostors phenomenon, essential in the tuning of a speaker recognition system, is carried out. The impostors are simulated in two ways: first by a transformation of the speech of a source speaker (the impostor) to the speech of a target speaker (the client) using the parameters extracted from the H+N model. This way of transforming the parameters is efficient as the false acceptance rate grows from 4% to 23%. Second, an automatic imposture by speech sepent concatenation is carried out. In this case the false acceptance rate grows to 30%. A way to become less sensitive to the spectral modification impostures is to remove the harmonic part or even the noise part modeled by the H+N from the original signal. Using such a subtraction decreases the false acceptance rate to 8% even if transformed impostors are used. To overcome the lack of training data — one of the main cause of modeling errors in speaker recognition — a decomposition of the recognition task into a set of binary classifiers is proposed. A classifier matrix is built and each of its elements has to classify word by word the data coming from the client and another speaker (named here an anti-speaker, randomly chosen from an extemal database). With such an approach it is possible to weight the results according to the vocabulary or the neighbours of the client in the parameter (acoustic) space. The output of the mamx classifiers are then weighted and mixed in order to produce a single output score. The weights are estimated on validation data, and if the weighting is done properly, the binary pair speaker recognition system gives better results than a state of the an HMM based system. In order to set a point of operation (i.e. a point on the COR cuwe) for the speaker recognition application, an a priori threshold has to be determined. Theoretically the threshold should be speaker independent when stochastic models are used. However, practical experiments show that this is not the case, as due to modeling mismatch the threshold becomes speaker and utterance length dependant. A theoretical framework showing how to adjust the threshold using the local likelihood ratio is then developed. Finally, a last modeling error correction method using decision fusion is proposed. Some practical experiments show the advantages and drawbacks of the fusion approach in speaker recognition applications.

EPFL1999

Robust audio segmentation

Jitendra Ajmera

Audio segmentation, in general, is the task of segmenting a continuous audio stream in terms of acoustically homogenous regions, where the rule of homogeneity depends on the task. This thesis aims at developing and investigating efficient, robust and unsupervised techniques for three important tasks related to audio segmentation, namely speech/music segmentation, speaker change detection and speaker clustering. The speech/music segmentation technique proposed in this thesis is based on the functioning of a HMM/ANN hybrid ASR system where an MLP estimates the posterior probabilities of different phonemes. These probabilities exhibit a particular pattern when the input is a speech signal. This pattern is captured in the form of feature vectors, which are then integrated in a HMM framework. The technique thus segments the audio data in terms of recognizable and non-recognizable segments. The efficiency of the proposed technique is demonstrated by a number of experiments conducted on broadcast news data exhibiting real-life scenarios (different speech and music styles, overlapping speech and music, non-speech sounds other than music, etc.). A novel distance metric is proposed in this thesis for the purpose of finding speaker segment boundaries (speaker change detection). The proposed metric can be seen as special case of Log Likelihood Ratio (LLR) or Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), where the number of parameters in the two models (or hypotheses) is forced to be equal. However, the advantage of the proposed metric over LLR, BIC and other metric based approaches is that it achieves comparable performance without requiring an adjustable threshold/penalty term, hence also eliminating the need for a development dataset. Speaker clustering is the task of unsupervised classification of the audio data in terms of speakers. For this purpose, a novel HMM based agglomerative clustering algorithm is proposed where, starting from a large number of clusters, closest clusters are merged in an iterative process. A novel merging criterion is proposed for this purpose, which does not require an adjustable threshold value and hence the stopping criterion is also automatically met when there are no more clusters left for merging. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with various experiments on broadcast news data and it is shown that the proposed criterion outperforms the use of LLR, when LLR is used with an optimal threshold value. These tasks obviously play an important role in the pre-processing stages of ASR. For example, correctly identifying non-recognizable segments in the audio stream and excluding them from recognition saves computation time in ASR and results in more meaningful transcriptions. Moreover, researchers have clearly shown the positive impact of further clustering of identified speech segments in terms of speakers (speaker clustering) on the transcription accuracy. However, we note that this processing has various other interesting and practical applications. For example, this provides characteristic information about the data (metadata), which is useful for the indexing of audio documents. One such application is investigated in this thesis which extracts this metadata and combines it with the ASR output, resulting in Rich Transcription (RT) which is much easier to understand for an end-user. In a further application, speaker clustering was combined with precise location information available in scenarios like smart meeting rooms to segment the meeting recordings jointly in terms of speakers and their locations in a meeting room. This is useful for automatic meeting summarization as it enables answering of questions like "who is speaking and where". This could be used to access, for example, a specific presentation made by a particular speaker or all the speech segments belonging to a particular speaker.

EPFL2005

Novel Methods for Incorporating Prior Knowledge for Automatic Speech Assessment

Subrahmanya Pavankumar Dubagunta

Speech signal conveys several kinds of information such as a message, speaker identity, emotional state of the speaker and social state of the speaker. Automatic speech assessment is a broad area that refers to using automatic methods to predict human judgements regarding different kinds of information conveyed in speech, such as intelligibility of the spoken message, dialect and fluency of the speaker. Unlike other speech technology areas, such as automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and automatic speaker recognition, automatic speech assessment is an emerging direction of research. One of the challenges in this field is that there is no single method or framework that scales across diverse speech assessment tasks. Thus, this thesis takes a broader outlook and focuses on prior knowledge incorporation for diverse data-driven speech assessment problems.First, we focus on the development of end-to-end acoustic modelling methods for non-verbal cue-based speech assessment. More precisely, we develop neural network-based methods that can integrate prior knowledge about speech production to learn to assess speech from raw waveform. We validate the developed methods through investigations on several speech assessment tasks, viz. dialect identification, depression detection and speech fluency rating prediction.Second, we focus on advancing a recently proposed phone posterior feature-based intelligibility estimation technique. Specifically, to enhance phone posterior probability estimation, we propose two novel approaches to incorporate linguistic segment level knowledge during the training of neural networks through estimation of confidence measures. We validate the two proposed approaches through automatic speech recognition and dysarthric speech intelligibility assessment studies.Finally, in the context of privacy preservation, we develop a signal processing-based speech pseudonymization approach that alters voice source information and vocal tract system information based on prior knowledge to obfuscate the speaker identity, while retaining intelligibility, i.e. the phones and words remain recognizable. We validate the proposed pseudonymization approach through listening experiments and automatic evaluations.

EPFL2021