DarkStream: real-time speech anonymization with low latency

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Quamer, Waris, Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Quamer, Waris
Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo
author_facet Quamer, Waris
Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo
contents We propose DarkStream, a streaming speech synthesis model for real-time speaker anonymization. To improve content encoding under strict latency constraints, DarkStream combines a causal waveform encoder, a short lookahead buffer, and transformer-based contextual layers. To further reduce inference time, the model generates waveforms directly via a neural vocoder, thus removing intermediate mel-spectrogram conversions. Finally, DarkStream anonymizes speaker identity by injecting a GAN-generated pseudo-speaker embedding into linguistic features from the content encoder. Evaluations show our model achieves strong anonymization, yielding close to 50% speaker verification EER (near-chance performance) on the lazy-informed attack scenario, while maintaining acceptable linguistic intelligibility (WER within 9%). By balancing low-latency, robust privacy, and minimal intelligibility degradation, DarkStream provides a practical solution for privacy-preserving real-time speech communication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04667
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DarkStream: real-time speech anonymization with low latency
Quamer, Waris
Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
We propose DarkStream, a streaming speech synthesis model for real-time speaker anonymization. To improve content encoding under strict latency constraints, DarkStream combines a causal waveform encoder, a short lookahead buffer, and transformer-based contextual layers. To further reduce inference time, the model generates waveforms directly via a neural vocoder, thus removing intermediate mel-spectrogram conversions. Finally, DarkStream anonymizes speaker identity by injecting a GAN-generated pseudo-speaker embedding into linguistic features from the content encoder. Evaluations show our model achieves strong anonymization, yielding close to 50% speaker verification EER (near-chance performance) on the lazy-informed attack scenario, while maintaining acceptable linguistic intelligibility (WER within 9%). By balancing low-latency, robust privacy, and minimal intelligibility degradation, DarkStream provides a practical solution for privacy-preserving real-time speech communication.
title DarkStream: real-time speech anonymization with low latency
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04667