1,387 research outputs found
Voice Conversion Based on Cross-Domain Features Using Variational Auto Encoders
An effective approach to non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is to utilize
deep neural networks (DNNs), specifically variational auto encoders (VAEs), to
model the latent structure of speech in an unsupervised manner. A previous
study has confirmed the ef- fectiveness of VAE using the STRAIGHT spectra for
VC. How- ever, VAE using other types of spectral features such as mel- cepstral
coefficients (MCCs), which are related to human per- ception and have been
widely used in VC, have not been prop- erly investigated. Instead of using one
specific type of spectral feature, it is expected that VAE may benefit from
using multi- ple types of spectral features simultaneously, thereby improving
the capability of VAE for VC. To this end, we propose a novel VAE framework
(called cross-domain VAE, CDVAE) for VC. Specifically, the proposed framework
utilizes both STRAIGHT spectra and MCCs by explicitly regularizing multiple
objectives in order to constrain the behavior of the learned encoder and de-
coder. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CD- VAE framework
outperforms the conventional VAE framework in terms of subjective tests.Comment: Accepted to ISCSLP 201
On Using Backpropagation for Speech Texture Generation and Voice Conversion
Inspired by recent work on neural network image generation which rely on
backpropagation towards the network inputs, we present a proof-of-concept
system for speech texture synthesis and voice conversion based on two
mechanisms: approximate inversion of the representation learned by a speech
recognition neural network, and on matching statistics of neuron activations
between different source and target utterances. Similar to image texture
synthesis and neural style transfer, the system works by optimizing a cost
function with respect to the input waveform samples. To this end we use a
differentiable mel-filterbank feature extraction pipeline and train a
convolutional CTC speech recognition network. Our system is able to extract
speaker characteristics from very limited amounts of target speaker data, as
little as a few seconds, and can be used to generate realistic speech babble or
reconstruct an utterance in a different voice.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201
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