Gender-Dependent Babble Maskers Created from Multi-speaker Speech for Speech Privacy Protection

We investigated on an efficient masker for speech privacy protection. Previously, we proposed a speaker-dependent (SD) masker created from speech of the masked speaker. This masker decreased the speech intelligibility to a much lower level than conventional babble maskers. However, this masker needs to be prepared for each potential speaker, and may be expensive to create and maintain. We also investigated on a same gender single-speaker masker, where the masker is created from a different speaker of the same gender. We found that this masker works just as well as the SD maskers for some speakers, while it was not as efficient for others. In this paper, we created gender-dependent maskers from multiple same-gender speakers. This masker was proven to mask as well as the SD maskers for the same gender speakers. We now only need to maintain two maskers, one masker per gender.