Structured Spectral Compression based Low-Bitrate Secure Speech Communications for Internet of Things assisted Non-Terrestrial Networks

Li Ping Qian, Zhehan Chen, Qianru Wang, Qian Wang, Yuan Wu, Xuemin Sherman Shen

This paper focuses on the Low-Bitrate Secure Speech Communications based on the Structured Spectral Compression (LB-S2C2). Specifically, the Mel spectral matrix of the speech signal is first encoded at the transmitter side through compressive sensing based on waveform segmentation and data quantization. Then, the Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) is combined with forward error correction to achieve reliable transmission of speech signals over wireless channels. Thirdly, the received signals are recovered as the speech at the receiver side. Finally, we conduct a series of simulation experiments for the performance evaluation of LB-S2C2. Our simulations reveal that the dictionary matrix used for the speech reconstruction is different from the one used for the high-order matrix sparsification by even only approximately 0.1%, and then the accurate speech recovery fails. It implies that the speech data can be securely transmitted when the dictionary matrix is preserved. More importantly, the LB-S2C2 exhibits a very high privacy protection capability with the average voiceprint similarity to be only 0.3, which is much lower than the 0.8 of the semantic speech communication scheme DeepSC-S, and even lower than the 0.33 of the latest speech communication scheme OFI-OFCNB. In addition, our simulations reveal that the proposed structured speech coding boasts a time complexity of merely O(n), and the proposed speech recovery scheme requires the 12-bit memory storage only, which outperforms the traditional encryption algorithms proposed for speech communications. In comparison with the conventional compression techniques, our spectral compression method renders the coding rate of only 3.9kbps, which is lower than the current lowest speech coding rate of 6.3kbps achieved by G.723.