How Private is Low-Frequency Speech Audio in the Wild? An Analysis of Verbal Intelligibility by Humans and Machines

Ailin Liu, Pepijn Vunderink, Jose Vargas Quiros, Chirag Raman, Hayley Hung

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

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Abstract

Low-frequency audio has been proposed as a promising privacy-preserving modality to study social dynamics in real-world settings. To this end, researchers have developed wearable devices that can record audio at frequencies as low as 1250 Hz to mitigate the automatic extraction of the verbal content of speech that may contain private details. This paper investigates the validity of this hypothesis, examining the degree to which low-frequency speech ensures verbal privacy. It includes simulating a potential privacy attack in various noise environments. Further, it explores the trade-off between the performance of voice activity detection, which is fundamental for understanding social behavior, and privacy-preservation. The evaluation incorporates subjective human intelligibility and automatic speech recognition performance, comprehensively analyzing the delicate balance between effective social behavior analysis and preserving verbal privacy.
Original languageEnglish
Pages2725-2729
Number of pages5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event25th Interspeech Conferece 2024 - Kos Island, Greece
Duration: 1 Sept 20245 Sept 2024

Conference

Conference25th Interspeech Conferece 2024
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityKos Island
Period1/09/245/09/24

Keywords

  • privacy
  • social signal processing

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