Fast intra-collection audio matching

Abstract

The general goal of audio matching is to identify all audio extracts of a music collection that are similar to a given query snippet. Over the last years, several approaches to this task have been presented. However, due to the complexity of audio matching the proposed approaches usually either yield excellent matches but have a poor runtime or provide quick responses albeit calculate less satisfying retrieval results. In this paper, we present a novel procedure that combines the positive aspects and efficiently computes good retrieval results. Our idea is to exploit the fact that in some practical applications queries are not arbitrary audio snippets but are rather given as extracts from the music collection itself (intra-collection query). This allows us to split the audio collection into equal sized overlapping segments and to precompute their retrieval results using dynamic time warping (DTW). Storing these matches in appropriate index structures enables us to efficiently recombine them at runtime. Our experiments indicate a significant speedup compared to classical DTW-based audio retrieval while achieving nearly the same retrieval quality.