Speaker Anonymization: Disentangling Speaker Features from Pre-Trained Speech Embeddings for Voice Conversion

Abstract

Speech is a crucial source of personal information, and the risk of attackers using such information increases day by day. Speaker privacy protection is crucial, and various approaches have been proposed to hide the speaker’s identity. One approach is voice anonymization, which aims to safeguard speaker identity while maintaining speech content through techniques such as voice conversion or spectral feature alteration. The significance of voice anonymization has grown due to the necessity to protect personal information in applications such as voice assistants, authentication, and customer support. Building upon the S3PRL-VC toolkit and on pre-trained speech and speaker representation models, this paper introduces a feature disentanglement approach to improve the de-identification performance of the state-of-the-art anonymization approaches based on voice conversion. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art speaker de-identification and causes minimal impact on the intelligibility of the signal after conversion.

Keywords

• privacy protection
• anonymization
• voice conversion
• voice cloning