English

Reconstructing faces from voices

Sound 2019-06-04 v2 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning Audio and Speech Processing Image and Video Processing

Abstract

Voice profiling aims at inferring various human parameters from their speech, e.g. gender, age, etc. In this paper, we address the challenge posed by a subtask of voice profiling - reconstructing someone's face from their voice. The task is designed to answer the question: given an audio clip spoken by an unseen person, can we picture a face that has as many common elements, or associations as possible with the speaker, in terms of identity? To address this problem, we propose a simple but effective computational framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). The network learns to generate faces from voices by matching the identities of generated faces to those of the speakers, on a training set. We evaluate the performance of the network by leveraging a closely related task - cross-modal matching. The results show that our model is able to generate faces that match several biometric characteristics of the speaker, and results in matching accuracies that are much better than chance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.10604,
  title  = {Reconstructing faces from voices},
  author = {Yandong Wen and Rita Singh and Bhiksha Raj},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.10604},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:23:54.406Z