Towards Gender-Dependent Babble Maskers for Speech Privacy Protection

In this paper, we investigated on an efficient masker for speech privacy protection. Previously, we proposed and evaluated a speaker-dependent masker which is created from speech of the speaker being masked. This masker was proven to lower the intelligibility of speech at 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. Accordingly, we investigated on an alternative masker, where the speech is masked by a masker created from a different speaker of the same gender. We measured the effectiveness of this gender-dependent masker, and found that male gender-dependent masker is feasible, with efficiency almost equal to the previously proposed speaker-dependent masker. However, female speech was not as effectively masked, and needs further investigation.