Who is Authentic Speaker

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenge of identifying authentic speakers from voice-converted outputs using a deep learning-based recognition system, demonstrating promising results despite the acoustic alterations introduced by voice conversion.

Contribution

It introduces a hierarchical VLAD-based deep neural network model for robust speaker recognition from converted voices, addressing a key challenge in speaker verification.

Findings

High recognition accuracy on converted voices

Robustness against voice quality variations

Effective use of hierarchical VLAD in DNNs

Abstract

Voice conversion (VC) using deep learning technologies can now generate high quality one-to-many voices and thus has been used in some practical application fields, such as entertainment and healthcare. However, voice conversion can pose potential social issues when manipulated voices are employed for deceptive purposes. Moreover, it is a big challenge to find who are real speakers from the converted voices as the acoustic characteristics of source speakers are changed greatly. In this paper we attempt to explore the feasibility of identifying authentic speakers from converted voices. This study is conducted with the assumption that certain information from the source speakers persists, even when their voices undergo conversion into different target voices. Therefore our experiments are geared towards recognising the source speakers given the converted voices, which are generated by using FragmentVC on the randomly paired utterances from source and target speakers. To improve the robustness against converted voices, our recognition model is constructed by using hierarchical vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) in deep neural networks. The authentic speaker recognition system is mainly tested in two aspects, including the impact of quality of converted voices and the variations of VLAD. The dataset used in this work is VCTK corpus, where source and target speakers are randomly paired. The results obtained on the converted utterances show promising performances in recognising authentic speakers from converted voices.