Title :
Exemplar-based voice conversion in noisy environment
Author :
Takashima, Ryoichi ; Takiguchi, Tetsuya ; Ariki, Yasuo
Author_Institution :
Grad. Sch. of Syst. Inf., Kobe Univ., Kobe, Japan
Abstract :
This paper presents a voice conversion (VC) technique for noisy environments, where parallel exemplars are introduced to encode the source speech signal and synthesize the target speech signal. The parallel exemplars (dictionary) consist of the source exemplars and target exemplars, having the same texts uttered by the source and target speakers. The input source signal is decomposed into the source exemplars, noise exemplars obtained from the input signal, and their weights (activities). Then, by using the weights of the source exemplars, the converted signal is constructed from the target exemplars. We carried out speaker conversion tasks using clean speech data and noise-added speech data. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed by comparing its effectiveness with that of a conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based method.
Keywords :
matrix decomposition; signal denoising; source separation; speaker recognition; speech coding; speech synthesis; clean speech data; exemplar-based voice conversion; noise-added speech data; noisy environment; nonnegative matrix factorization; parallel exemplars; source exemplars; source signal decomposition; source speakers; source speech signal encoding; speaker conversion tasks; target exemplars; target speakers; target speech signal synthesis; text utterance; Dictionaries; Feature extraction; Noise; Noise measurement; Sparse matrices; Speech; Speech processing; exemplar-based; noise robustness; non-negative matrix factorization; sparse coding; voice conversion;
Conference_Titel :
Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 2012 IEEE
Conference_Location :
Miami, FL
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-5125-6
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4673-5124-9
DOI :
10.1109/SLT.2012.6424242
