2024/07/18 by Ailin Liu, Pepijn Vunderink, Liu, Ailin +7 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Psychology · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech and dialogue systems #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.13266
openalex publication_date 2024/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.