Privacy-preserving sound to degrade automatic speaker verification performance

In this paper, a privacy protection method to prevent speaker identification from recorded speech is proposed and evaluated. Although many techniques for preserving various private information included in speech have been proposed, their impacts on human speech communication in physical space are not taken into account. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes privacy-preserving sound as a privacy protection method. The privacy-preserving sound can degrade speaker verification performance without interfering with human speech communication in physical space. To make a first step toward solving this problem, suitable sound characteristics for preserving privacy are evaluated in terms of the speaker verification performance and speech intelligibility. The experimental results show that appropriate sound can efficiently degrade the speaker verification performance without degrading speech intelligibility.