Training Multi-Speaker Neural Text-to-Speech Systems using Speaker-Imbalanced Speech Corpora

When the available data of a target speaker is insufficient to train a high quality speaker-dependent neural text-to-speech (TTS) system, we can combine data from multiple speakers and train a multi-speaker TTS model instead. Many studies have shown that neural multi-speaker TTS model trained with a small amount data from multiple speakers combined can generate synthetic speech with better quality and stability than a speaker-dependent one. However when the amount of data from each speaker is highly unbalanced, the best approach to make use of the excessive data remains unknown. Our experiments showed that simply combining all available data from every speaker to train a multi-speaker model produces better than or at least similar performance to its speaker-dependent counterpart. Moreover by using an ensemble multi-speaker model, in which each subsystem is trained on a subset of available data, we can further improve the quality of the synthetic speech especially for underrepresented speakers whose training data is limited.

Introduction to Voice Presentation Attack Detection and Recent Advances

Over the past few years significant progress has been made in the field of presentation attack detection (PAD) for automatic speaker recognition (ASV). This includes the development of new speech corpora, standard evaluation protocols and advancements in front-end feature extraction and back-end classifiers. The use of standard databases and evaluation protocols has enabled for the first time the meaningful benchmarking of different PAD solutions. This chapter summarises the progress, with a focus on studies completed in the last three years. The article presents a summary of findings and lessons learned from two ASVspoof challenges, the first community-led benchmarking efforts. These show that ASV PAD remains an unsolved problem and that further attention is required to develop generalised PAD solutions which have potential to detect diverse and previously unseen spoofing attacks.

Identifying Computer-Translated Paragraphs using Coherence Features

We have developed a method for extracting the coherence features from a paragraph by matching similar words in its sentences. We conducted an experiment with a parallel German corpus containing 2000 human-created and 2000 machine-translated paragraphs. The result showed that our method achieved the best performance (accuracy = 72.3%, equal error rate = 29.8%) when it is compared with previous methods on various computer-generated text including translation and paper generation (best accuracy = 67.9%, equal error rate = 32.0%). Experiments on Dutch, another rich resource language, and a low resource one (Japanese) attained similar performances. It demonstrated the efficiency of the coherence features at distinguishing computer-translated from human-created paragraphs on diverse languages.

Attentive Filtering Networks for Audio Replay Attack Detection

An attacker may use a variety of techniques to fool an automatic speaker verification system into accepting them as a genuine user. Anti-spoofing methods meanwhile aim to make the system robust against such attacks. The ASVspoof 2017 Challenge focused specifically on replay attacks, with the intention of measuring the limits of replay attack detection as well as developing countermeasures against them. In this work, we propose our replay attacks detection system - Attentive Filtering Network, which is composed of an attention-based filtering mechanism that enhances feature representations in both the frequency and time domains, and a ResNet-based classifier. We show that the network enables us to visualize the automatically acquired feature representations that are helpful for spoofing detection. Attentive Filtering Network attains an evaluation EER of 8.99$\%$ on the ASVspoof 2017 Version 2.0 dataset. With system fusion, our best system further obtains a 30$\%$ relative improvement over the ASVspoof 2017 enhanced baseline system.

Neural source-filter-based waveform model for statistical parametric speech synthesis

Neural waveform models such as the WaveNet are used in many recent text-to-speech systems, but the original WaveNet is quite slow in waveform generation because of its autoregressive (AR) structure. Although faster non-AR models were recently reported, they may be prohibitively complicated due to the use of a distilling training method and the blend of other disparate training criteria. This study proposes a non-AR neural source-filter waveform model that can be directly trained using spectrum-based training criteria and the stochastic gradient descent method. Given the input acoustic features, the proposed model first uses a source module to generate a sine-based excitation signal and then uses a filter module to transform the excitation signal into the output speech waveform. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed model generated waveforms at least 100 times faster than the AR WaveNet and the quality of its synthetic speech is close to that of speech generated by the AR WaveNet. Ablation test results showed that both the sine-wave excitation signal and the spectrum-based training criteria were essential to the performance of the proposed model.

Waveform generation for text-to-speech synthesis using pitch-synchronous multi-scale generative adversarial networks

The state-of-the-art in text-to-speech synthesis has recently improved considerably due to novel neural waveform generation methods, such as WaveNet. However, these methods suffer from their slow sequential inference process, while their parallel versions are difficult to train and even more expensive computationally. Meanwhile, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved impressive results in image generation and are making their way into audio applications; parallel inference is among their lucrative properties. By adopting recent advances in GAN training techniques, this investigation studies waveform generation for TTS in two domains (speech signal and glottal excitation). Listening test results show that while direct waveform generation with GAN is still far behind WaveNet, a GAN-based glottal excitation model can achieve quality and voice similarity on par with a WaveNet vocoder.

STFT spectral loss for training a neural speech waveform model

This paper proposes a new loss using short-time Fourier transform (STFT) spectra for the aim of training a high-performance neural speech waveform model that predicts raw continuous speech waveform samples directly. Not only amplitude spectra but also phase spectra obtained from generated speech waveforms are used to calculate the proposed loss. We also mathematically show that training of the waveform model on the basis of the proposed loss can be interpreted as maximum likelihood training that assumes the amplitude and phase spectra of generated speech waveforms following Gaussian and von Mises distributions, respectively. Furthermore, this paper presents a simple network architecture as the speech waveform model, which is composed of uni-directional long short-term memories (LSTMs) and an auto-regressive structure. Experimental results showed that the proposed neural model synthesized high-quality speech waveforms.

Audiovisual speaker conversion: jointly and simultaneously transforming facial expression and acoustic characteristics

An audiovisual speaker conversion method is presented for simultaneously transforming the facial expressions and voice of a source speaker into those of a target speaker. Transforming the facial and acoustic features together makes it possible for the converted voice and facial expressions to be highly correlated and for the generated target speaker to appear and sound natural. It uses three neural networks: a conversion network that fuses and transforms the facial and acoustic features, a waveform generation network that produces the waveform from both the converted facial and acoustic features, and an image reconstruction network that outputs an RGB facial image also based on both the converted features. The results of experiments using an emotional audiovisual database showed that the proposed method achieved significantly higher naturalness compared with one that separately transformed acoustic and facial features.

Investigation of enhanced Tacotron text-to-speech synthesis systems with self-attention for pitch accent language

End-to-end speech synthesis is a promising approach that directly converts raw text to speech. Although it was shown that Tacotron2 outperforms classical pipeline systems with regards to naturalness in English, its applicability to other languages is still unknown. Japanese could be one of the most difficult languages for which to achieve end-to-end speech synthesis, largely due to its character diversity and pitch accents. Therefore, state-of-the-art systems are still based on a traditional pipeline framework that requires a separate text analyzer and duration model. Towards end-to-end Japanese speech synthesis, we extend Tacotron to systems with self-attention to capture long-term dependencies related to pitch accents and compare their audio quality with classical pipeline systems under various conditions to show their pros and cons. In a large-scale listening test, we investigated the impacts of the presence of accentual-type labels, the use of force or predicted alignments, and acoustic features used as local condition parameters of the Wavenet vocoder. Our results reveal that although the proposed systems still do not match the quality of a top-line pipeline system for Japanese, we show important stepping stones towards end-to-end Japanese speech synthesis.

Capsule-Forensics: Using Capsule Networks to Detect Forged Images and Videos

Recent advances in media generation techniques have made it easier for attackers to create forged images and videos. State-of-the-art methods enable the real-time creation of a forged version of a single video obtained from a social network. Although numerous methods have been developed for detecting forged images and videos, they are generally targeted at certain domains and quickly become obsolete as new kinds of attacks appear. The method introduced in this paper uses a capsule network to detect various kinds of spoofs, from replay attacks using printed images or recorded videos to computer-generated videos using deep convolutional neural networks. It extends the application of capsule networks beyond their original intention to the solving of inverse graphics problems.