Acoustic masking based on time-reversed speech

Acoustic masking refers to the effect that a sound can be suppressed by another. It can be used for speech privacy protection. According to human auditory characteristics, better acoustic masking can be obtained when the spectrum of the masking acoustic signal is close to the target speech. This paper presents an improved acoustic masking algorithm based on time-reversion of the speech to be masked. Time-reversed speech preserves the speaker's pronunciation features but is meaningless in semantics. The proposed method can significantly improve the security of speech information and the deciphering difficulty for eavesdropping. The experimental results show that the generated speech-like noise has a good masking effect and is comfortable for speakers.