Non-parallel dictionary learning for voice conversion using non-negative Tucker decomposition

Abstract

Voice conversion (VC) is a technique of exclusively converting speaker-specific information in the source speech while preserving the associated phonemic information. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)-based VC has been widely researched because of the natural-sounding voice it achieves when compared with conventional Gaussian mixture model-based VC. In conventional NMF-VC, models are trained using parallel data which results in the speech data requiring elaborate pre-processing to generate parallel data. NMF-VC also tends to be an extensive model as this method has several parallel exemplars for the dictionary matrix, leading to a high computational cost. In this study, an innovative parallel dictionary-learning method using non-negative Tucker decomposition (NTD) is proposed. The proposed method uses tensor decomposition and decomposes an input observation into a set of mode matrices and one core tensor. The proposed NTD-based dictionary-learning method estimates the dictionary matrix for NMF-VC without using parallel data. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods in both parallel and non-parallel settings.