Exemplar-Based Voice Conversion Using Sparse Representation in Noisy Environments

SUMMARY This paper presents a voice conversion (VC) technique for noisy environments, where parallel exemplars are introduced to encode the source speech signal and synthesize the target speech signal. The parallel exemplars (dictionary) consist of the source exemplars and target exem-plars, having the same texts uttered by the source and target speakers. The input source signal is decomposed into the source exemplars, noise ex-emplars and their weights (activities). Then, by using the weights of the source exemplars, the converted signal is constructed from the target ex-emplars. We carried out speaker conversion tasks using clean speech data and noise-added speech data. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed by comparing its effectiveness with that of a conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based method.