Spectral conversion based on maximum likelihood estimation considering global variance of converted parameter

The paper describes a novel spectral conversion method for voice transformation. We perform spectral conversion between speakers using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) on the joint probability density of source and target features. A smooth spectral sequence can be estimated by applying maximum likelihood (ML) estimation to the GMM-based mapping using dynamic features. However, there is still degradation of the converted speech quality due to an over-smoothing of the converted spectra, which is inevitable in conventional ML-based parameter estimation. In order to alleviate the over-smoothing, we propose an ML-based conversion taking account of the global variance of the converted parameter in each utterance. Experimental results show that the performance of the voice conversion can be improved by using the global variance information. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is more effective than spectral enhancement by postfiltering.