Abstract
Voice conversion (VC) involves altering the vocal characteristics of a source speaker to resemble those of a target speaker while maintaining the same linguistic content. Recently, researchers have turned to deep generative models, particularly generative adversarial network (GAN) models, for VC studies due to their superior performance compared to statistical models. However, there is a noticeable disparity in naturalness between real speech samples and those generated by state-of-the-art (SOTA) VC models. This study introduces an enhanced GAN model for non-parallel VC, which employs mel-spectrograms as the speech feature. The enhanced GAN model incorporates a region normalization technique in the generator and a discriminator based on capsule networks (Caps-Net), to improve the quality of the generated speech samples. The proposed model is evaluated using the VCC 2018 and CMU Arctic datasets. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that the region normalization technique-based Caps-Net GAN (RNCapsGAN-VC) model outperforms the SOTA MaskCycleGAN-VC model in terms of both objective and subjective evaluations considering less training time.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The generated speech samples and code implementation can be found at https://github.com/BlueBlaze6335/RNCapsGAN-VC.
References
Abe, M., Nakamura, S., Shikano, K., Kuwabara, H.: Voice conversion through vector quantization. In: International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 1988, vol. 1, pp. 655–658 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.1988.196671
Chen, Y.N., Liu, L.J., Hu, Y.J., Jiang, Y., Ling, Z.H.: Improving recognition-synthesis based any-to-one voice conversion with cyclic training. In: ICASSP 2022, pp. 7007–7011 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP43922.2022.9747140
Coto-Jiménez, M., Goddard-Close, J., Martínez-Licona, F.M.: Quality assessment of HMM-based speech synthesis using acoustical vowel analysis. In: Ronzhin, A., Potapova, R., Delic, V. (eds.) SPECOM 2014. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 8773, pp. 368–375. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11581-8_46
Dhar, S., Jana, N.D., Das, S.: An adaptive learning based generative adversarial network for one-to-one voice conversion. IEEE Trans. Artif. Intell. 4, 92–106 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/TAI.2022.3149858
Du, H., Tian, X., Xie, L., Li, H.: Optimizing voice conversion network with cycle consistency loss of speaker identity. In: 2021 IEEE SLT, pp. 507–513 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1109/SLT48900.2021.9383567
Goodfellow, I., et al.: Generative adversarial nets. In: Advances in NIPS, vol. 27. Curran Associates, Inc. (2014)
Jaiswal, A., AbdAlmageed, W., Wu, Y., Natarajan, P.: CapsuleGAN: generative adversarial capsule network. In: Leal-Taixé, L., Roth, S. (eds.) ECCV 2018. LNCS, vol. 11131, pp. 526–535. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11015-4_38
Jolicoeur-Martineau, A.: The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GAN. arXiv arXiv:1807.00734 (2019)
Kaneko, T., Kameoka, H., Tanaka, K., Hojo, N.: CycleGAN-VC2: improved cycleGAN-based non-parallel voice conversion. In: ICASSP, vol. 2019, pp. 6820–6824 (2019)
Kaneko, T., Kameoka, H., Tanaka, K., Hojo, N.: MaskCycleGAN-VC: learning non-parallel voice conversion with filling in frames. In: ICASSP, pp. 5919–5923 (2021)
Kaneko, T., Kameoka, H.: CycleGAN-VC: non-parallel voice conversion using cycle-consistent adversarial networks. In: 2018, 26th EUSIPCO, pp. 2100–2104 (2018). https://doi.org/10.23919/EUSIPCO.2018.8553236
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)
Kishida, T., Nakashika, T.: Non-parallel voice conversion based on free-energy minimization of speaker-conditional restricted Boltzmann machine. In: 2022 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC), pp. 251–255 (2022). https://doi.org/10.23919/APSIPAASC55919.2022.9980151
Kominek, J., Black, A.W.: The CMU arctic speech databases. In: SSW (2004)
Kumar, K., et al.: MelGAN: generative adversarial networks for conditional waveform synthesis. In: NeurIPS (2019)
Lorenzo-Trueba, J., et al.: The voice conversion challenge 2018: promoting development of parallel and nonparallel methods. In: Odyssey (2018)
Mazzia, V., Salvetti, F., Chiaberge, M.: Efficient-CapsNet: capsule network with self-attention routing. Sci. Rep. 11(1), 14634 (2021)
Mazzia, V., Salvetti, F., Chiaberge, M.: Efficient-CapsNet: capsule network with self-attention routing. CoRR abs/2101.12491 (2021). https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12491
Sabour, S., Frosst, N., Hinton, G.E.: Dynamic routing between capsules. arXiv arXiv:1710.09829 (2017)
Sisman, B., Yamagishi, J., King, S., Li, H.: An overview of voice conversion and its challenges: from statistical modeling to deep learning. IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 29, 132–157 (2021)
Sun, L., Li, K., Wang, H., Kang, S., Meng, H.M.: Phonetic posteriorgrams for many-to-one voice conversion without parallel data training. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), pp. 1–6 (2016)
Uchida, H., Saito, D., Minematsu, N., Hirose, K.: Statistical acoustic-to-articulatory mapping unified with speaker normalization based on voice conversion. In: Proceedings of the INTERSPEECH 2015, pp. 588–592 (2015). https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2015-209
Vaswani, A., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: NIPS (2017)
Wu, J., Polyak, A., Taigman, Y., Fong, J., Agrawal, P., He, Q.: Multilingual text-to-speech training using cross language voice conversion and self-supervised learning of speech representations. In: ICASSP 2022, pp. 8017–8021 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP43922.2022.9746282
Yu, T., et al.: Region normalization for image inpainting. In: AAAI (2020)
Yun, Y.-S., Jung, J., Eun, S.: Voice conversion between synthesized bilingual voices using line spectral frequencies. In: Ronzhin, A., Potapova, R., Fakotakis, N. (eds.) SPECOM 2015. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 9319, pp. 463–471. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23132-7_57
Zahariev, V., Azarov, E., Petrovsky, A.: Voice conversion for TTS systems with tuning on the target speaker based on GMM. In: Karpov, A., Potapova, R., Mporas, I. (eds.) SPECOM 2017. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10458, pp. 788–798. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66429-3_79
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Akhter, M.T., Banerjee, P., Dhar, S., Ghosh, S., Jana, N.D. (2023). Region Normalized Capsule Network Based Generative Adversarial Network for Non-parallel Voice Conversion. In: Karpov, A., Samudravijaya, K., Deepak, K.T., Hegde, R.M., Agrawal, S.S., Prasanna, S.R.M. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14338. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-48308-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48309-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)