Title
Audio privacy: reducing speech intelligibility while preserving environmental sounds
Abstract
Audio monitoring has many applications but also raises privacy concerns. In an attempt to help alleviate these concerns, we have developed a method for reducing the intelligibility of speech while preserving intonation and the ability to recognize most environmental sounds. The method is based on identifying vocalic regions and replacing the vocal tract transfer function of these regions with the transfer function from prerecorded vowels, where the identity of the replacement vowel is independent of the identity of the spoken syllable. The audio signal is then re-synthesized using the original pitch and energy, but with the modified vocal tract transfer function. We performed an intelligibility study which showed that environmental sounds remained recognizable but speech intelligibility can be dramatically reduced to a 7% word recognition rate.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1459359.1459472
ACM Multimedia 2001
Keywords
Field
DocType
speech intelligibility,audio monitoring,intelligibility study,modified vocal tract transfer,environmental sound,transfer function,audio privacy,audio signal,vocal tract transfer function,prerecorded vowel,original pitch,vocal tract,word recognition
Environmental sounds,Audio signal,Computer science,Word recognition,Speech recognition,Syllable,Vowel,Vocal tract,Intelligibility (communication)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.96
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Francine Chen11218153.96
John Adcock221221.30
Shruti Krishnagiri340.96