One-Class Classification for Spectral Join Cost Calculation in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

This letter introduces one-class classification as a framework for the spectral join cost calculation in unit selection speech synthesis. Instead of quantifying the spectral cost by a single distance measure, a data-driven approach is adopted which exploits the natural similarity of consecutive speech frames in the speech database. A pair of consecutive frames is jointly represented as a vector of spectral distance measures which provide training data for the one-class classifier. At synthesis runtime, speech units are selected based on the scores derived from the classifier. Experimental results provide evidence on the effectiveness of the proposed method which clearly outperforms the conventional approaches currently employed.