Novel approach of MFCC based alignment and WD-residual modification for voice conversion using RBF

The voice conversion system modifies the speaker specific characteristics of the source speaker to that of the target speaker, so it perceives like target speaker. The speaker specific characteristics of the speech signal are reflected at different levels such as the shape of the vocal tract, shape of the glottal excitation and long term prosody. The shape of the vocal tract is represented by Line Spectral Frequency (LSF) and the shape of glottal excitation by Linear Predictive (LP) residuals. In this paper, the fourth level wavelet packet transform is applied to LP-residual to generate the sixteen sub-bands. This approach not only reduces the computational complexity but also presents a genuine transformation model over state of the art statistical prediction methods. In voice conversion, the alignment is an essential process which aligns the features of the source and target speakers. In this paper, the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) based warping path is proposed to align the LSF and LP-residual sub-bands using proposed constant source and constant target alignment. The conventional alignment technique is compared with two proposed approaches namely, constant source and constant target. Analysis shows that, constant source alignment using MFCC warping path performs slightly better than the constant target alignment and the state-of-the-art alignment approach. Generalized mapping models are developed for each sub-band using Radial Basis Function neural network (RBF) and are compared with Gaussian Mixture mapping model (GMM) and residual selection approach. Various subjective and objective evaluation measures indicate significant performance of RBF based residual mapping approach over the state-of-the-art approaches. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.