# MaskCycleGAN-based Whisper to Normal Speech Conversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14797/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04382/) (2016)
- [Mask-ShadowGAN: Learning to Remove Shadows from Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10683/) (2019)
- [CycleGAN-VC2: Improved CycleGAN-based Non-parallel Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04631/) (2019)
- [CycleGAN-VC3: Examining and Improving CycleGAN-VCs for Mel-spectrogram Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11672/) (2020)
- [MaskCycleGAN-VC: Learning Non-parallel Voice Conversion with Filling in Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12841/) (2021)
- [Whispered-to-voiced Alaryngeal Speech Conversion with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10687/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whisper to normal speech conversion is an active area of research. Various architectures based on generative adversarial networks have been proposed in the recent past. Especially, recent study shows that MaskCycleGAN, which is a mask guided, and cyclic consistency keeping, generative adversarial network, performs really well for voice conversion from spectrogram representations. In the current work we present a MaskCycleGAN approach for the conversion of whispered speech to normal speech. We find that tuning the mask parameters, and pre-processing the signal with a voice activity detector provides superior performance when compared to the existing approach. The wTIMIT dataset is used for evaluation. Objective metrics such as PESQ and G-Loss are used to evaluate the converted speech, along with subjective evaluation using mean opinion score. The results show that the proposed approach offers considerable benefits.