Article
Impact of Pathological Speech on Speaker Anonymization – A Proof of Concept (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Speaker anonymization is important for identity concealment in different contexts. In this work, we examine the effects of pathological speech on the anonymization process. We are differentiating between two scenarios, a pathology-preserving anonymization in the diagnostic or remote treatment environment and a pathology-obfuscating anonymization as a general approach.In our contribution, we show how different state-of-the-art approaches perform at this task. First results show that when utilizing a speaker conversion method, the pathologies are still present after anonymization. This effect is not only audible and therefore improving subjective recognition rates, but also shown in the objective evaluation. While in a remote treatment scenario for speech pathologies, this solution might still be useful, it presents a vulnerability in the anonymization. To avoid re-identification by these pathologies, we propose another approach utilizing automatic speech recognition and text based speech synthesis.