Title
Voice Conversion Using Input-To-Output Highway Networks
Abstract
This paper proposes Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based Voice Conversion (VC) using input-to-output highway networks. VC is a speech synthesis technique that converts input features into output speech parameters, and DNN-based acoustic models for VC are used to estimate the output speech parameters from the input speech parameters. Given that the input and output are often in the same domain (e.g., cepstrum) in VC, this paper proposes a VC using highway networks connected from the input to output. The acoustic models predict the weighted spectral differentials between the input and output spectral parameters. The architecture not only alleviates over-smoothing effects that degrade speech quality, but also effectively represents the characteristics of spectral parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms Feed-Forward neural networks in terms of the speech quality and speaker individuality of the converted speech.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1587/transinf.2017EDL8034
IEICE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION AND SYSTEMS
Keywords
Field
DocType
statistical parametric speech synthesis, DNN-based voice conversion, highway networks, over-smoothing
Computer vision,Computer science,Speech recognition,Artificial intelligence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
E100D
8
1745-1361
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.47
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Saito, Yuki1267.87
Shinnosuke Takamichi27522.08
Saruwatari, H.365290.81