著者
Yuki SAITO Kei AKUZAWA Kentaro TACHIBANA
出版者
The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
雑誌
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.E103-D, no.9, pp.1978-1987, 2020-09-01

This paper presents a method for many-to-one voice conversion using phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) based on an adversarial training of deep neural networks (DNNs). A conventional method for many-to-one VC can learn a mapping function from input acoustic features to target acoustic features through separately trained DNN-based speech recognition and synthesis models. However, 1) the differences among speakers observed in PPGs and 2) an over-smoothing effect of generated acoustic features degrade the converted speech quality. Our method performs a domain-adversarial training of the recognition model for reducing the PPG differences. In addition, it incorporates a generative adversarial network into the training of the synthesis model for alleviating the over-smoothing effect. Unlike the conventional method, ours jointly trains the recognition and synthesis models so that they are optimized for many-to-one VC. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves the converted speech quality compared with conventional VC methods.
著者
Yuki SAITO Kei AKUZAWA Kentaro TACHIBANA
出版者
The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
雑誌
IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.E103.D, no.9, pp.1978-1987, 2020-09-01 (Released:2020-09-01)
参考文献数
53

This paper presents a method for many-to-one voice conversion using phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) based on an adversarial training of deep neural networks (DNNs). A conventional method for many-to-one VC can learn a mapping function from input acoustic features to target acoustic features through separately trained DNN-based speech recognition and synthesis models. However, 1) the differences among speakers observed in PPGs and 2) an over-smoothing effect of generated acoustic features degrade the converted speech quality. Our method performs a domain-adversarial training of the recognition model for reducing the PPG differences. In addition, it incorporates a generative adversarial network into the training of the synthesis model for alleviating the over-smoothing effect. Unlike the conventional method, ours jointly trains the recognition and synthesis models so that they are optimized for many-to-one VC. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves the converted speech quality compared with conventional VC methods.