Project description
Protecting voices in a digital world
Privacy breaches now account for the majority of all cybercrimes, with voice calls increasingly at risk. Compromised speaker biometrics can let criminals generate fake speech, enabling identity theft, financial fraud, and even fake hate speech. Meanwhile, in regions with unreliable communication networks, dropped calls and garbled speech frustrate users, yet the threat to privacy remains. With this in mind, the EU-funded DeRoCo project aims to address both issues. Its far-end system will anonymise speakers using advanced generative models, improving security without compromising recognition accuracy. The near-end system will reconstruct interrupted speech with novel attention-based techniques, surpassing current methods in naturalness and reliability. Together, these innovations endeavour to make voice communications safer and more resilient worldwide.
Objective
Privacy infringment is one of the most prevalent forms of cybercrime, accounting for about 72% of all cybercrimes alone. Such is also the case with speaker biometrics, which, if compromised over a call, can be manipulated to generate fake speech to impersonate a person. Such identity theft over voice calls can cause financial losses, cyber-bullying and fake hate speech generation. On the other hand, in parts of the world where the communication infrastructure is not robust, a person is more agitated over not being able to get his message across over a call due to channel breakage. In such cases, privacy concerns take a back seat; but that does not imply the absence of the threat. To that end, I propose a joint solution to these issues, that can be integrated with the existing communication infrastructure. The solution consists of two segments: far-end and near-end. The far-end segment shall handle the speaker de-identification task. Existing methods of speaker anonymization are limited in terms of achievable anonymity. Improvements can be made through cycle-consistent GAN to generate better synthetic speaker representation vectors. I plan on surpassing the existing benchmark in terms of lower automatic speaker verification (ASV) scores and good automatic speech recogntion (ASR) scores. Additionally, the entire segment would be brought online for integration with real-time communication systems. The near-end segment shall be handling the speech inpainting task. While existing techniques are able to fill the blanks in acoustic signals pertaining to music and background sounds quite well, they are ill-equipped for speech. The existing speech inpainting techniques chiefly rely on spectrogram-based approaches which result in unnatural reconstructions. I plan to study novel approaches of speech inpainting, including attention based formant imputation techniques and surpass the current benchmarks for successfully filling speech gaps in the range of 1600ms.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.4.1 - Widening participation and spreading excellence
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-WIDERA-2024-TALENTS-02
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151 25 MAROUSSI
Greece
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