6417923
Analysis of Sound Features for Music Timbre Recognition
Recently, communication, digital music creation, and computer storage technology has led to the dynamic increasing of online music repositories in both number and size, where automatic content-based indexing is critical for users to identify possible favorite music pieces. Timbre recognition is one of the important subtasks for such an indexing purpose. Lots of research has been carried out in exploring new sound features to describe the characteristics of a musical sound. The moving picture expert group (MPEG) provides a standard set of multimedia features, including low level acoustical features based on latest research in this area. This paper introduces our newly designed temporal features used for automatic indexing of musical sounds and evaluates them with MPEG7 descriptors, and other popular features.
15778796
MIRAI: Multi-hierarchical, FS-Tree Based Music Information Retrieval System
With the fast booming of online music repositories, there is a need for content-based automatic indexing which will help users to find their favorite music objects in real time. Recently, numerous successful approaches on musical data feature extraction and selection have been proposed for instrument recognition in monophonic sounds. Unfortunately, none of these methods can be successfully applied to polyphonic sounds. Identification of music instruments in polyphonic sounds is still difficult and challenging, especially when harmonic partials are overlapping with each other. This has stimulated the research on music sound separation and new features development for content-based automatic music information retrieval. Our goal is to build a cooperative query answering system (QAS), for a musical database, retrieving from it all objects satisfying queries like "find all musical pieces in pentatonic scale with a viola and piano where viola is playing for minimum 20 seconds and piano for minimum 10 seconds". We use the database of musical sounds, containing almost 4000 sounds taken from the MUMs (McGill University Master Samples), as a vehicle to construct several classifiers for automatic instrument recognition. Classifiers showing the best performance are adopted for automatic indexing of musical pieces by instruments. Our musical database has an FS-tree (Frame Segment Tree) structure representation. The cooperativeness of QAS is driven by several hierarchical structures used for classifying musical instruments.
9156106
Blind Signal Separation of Similar Pitches and Instruments in a Noisy Polyphonic Domain
In our continuing work on ”Blind Signal Separation” this paper focuses on extending our previous work [1] by creating a data set that can successfully perform blind separation of polyphonic signals containing similar instruments playing similar notes in a noisy environment. Upon isolating and subtracting the dominant signal from a base signal containing varying types and amounts of noise, even though we purposefully excluded any identical matches in the dataset, the signal separation system successfully built a resulting foreign set of synthesized sounds that the classifier correctly recognized. Herein, this paper presents a system that classifies and separates two harmonic signals with added noise. This novel methodology incorporates Knowledge Discovery, MPEG7-based segmentation and Inverse Fourier Transforms.
10884708
Multi-way Hierarchic Classification of Musical Instrument Sounds
Musical instrument sounds can be classified in various ways, depending on the instrument or articulation classification. This paper presents a number of possible generalizations of musical instruments sounds classification which can be used to construct different hierarchical decision attributes. Each decision attribute will lead us to a new classifier and the same to a different system for automatic indexing of music by instrument sounds and their generalizations. Values of a decision attribute and their generalizations are used to construct atomic queries of a query language built for retrieving musical objects from MIR database (see http://www.mir.uncc.edu). When query fails, the cooperative strategy will try to find its lowest generalization which does not fail, taking into consideration all available hierarchical attributes. Thus, the music object representing most similar object in the database is returned as the query answer. This paper evaluates only two hierarchical attributes upon the same dataset which contains 2628 distinct musical samples of 102 instruments from McGill University Master Samples (MUMS) CD collection.
9768130
Maximum Likelihood Study for Sound Pattern Separation and Recognition
The increasing needs of content-based automatic indexing for large musical repositories have led to extensive investigation in musical sound pattern recognition. Numerous acoustical sound features have been developed to describe the characteristics of a sound piece. Many of these features have been successfully applied to monophonic sound timbre recognition. However, most of those features failed to describe enough characteristics of polyphonic sounds for the purpose of classification, where sound patterns from different sources are overlapping with each other. Thus, sound separation technique is needed to process polyphonic sounds into monophonic sounds before feature extraction. In this paper, we proposed a novel sound source separation and estimation system to isolate sound sources by maximum likelihood fundamental frequency estimation and pattern matching of a harmonic sequence in our feature database.
12091703
Indexing and retrieval of 3D models aided by active learning
We demonstrate a system for indexing and retrieval of 3D models aided by active learning. We propose a new set of region-based features for 3D models. Each model is treated as a solid volume with a uniform density. Features such as the volume-surface ratio, the moment invariants and the Fourier transform coefficients are efficiently calculated from the mesh model directly. Comparable retrieval performance is achieved with other features such as the cord histogram, the 3D shape spectrum, etc. To further improve the performance, we incorporate hidden annotation into our system. We propose to use active learning to improve the annotation efficiency. We show that with active learning, the system can perform better than random annotation, and the retrieval result improves rapidly with the number of annotated samples. Moreover, relevance feedback is included in the system and combined with active learning, which provides better user-adoptive retrieval results.
30275744
Robust Active Shape Model Construction and Fitting for Facial Feature Localization
Active Shape Model (ASM) has proved to be a powerful tool for interpreting face images. However, it may fail in the presence of non-Gaussian noise, or outliers. In this paper, we present a framework for both automatic model construction and efficient model fitting with outliers. In model construction, the training face samples are automatically labeled by local image search using Gabor wavelet features. Then robust principle component analysis (RPCA) is applied to capture the statistics of shape variations. In model fitting, an error function is introduced to deal with the outlier problem, which provides a connection to robust M-estimation. Gauss-Newton algorithm is adopted to efficiently optimize the robust energy function. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our approach over previous methods.
10838244
Streaming SMIL Presentations via a Multimedia Semantic Model
The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) allows Web designers to design complicated and vivid multimedia presentations in a declarative manner. In this paper, an abstract semantic model called Multimedia Augmented Transition Network (MATN) is used to model the conceptual structure of SMIL, as well as the temporal relations and synchronization control. The advantages of using the MATN model are its simplicity and ease of modification (scalability). Users can easily generate their favorite multimedia presentations using MATNs and render them using the SMIL players. Since the SMIL specification is quite new to the Internet society, the functionality of the players is limited, i.e., they often acquire proprietary platforms or cannot deal with MPEG or RTP media objects. Another contribution of this paper is to propose a novel architecture based on Java JMF technology for tackling with such constraints.
21282948
Information-Based Cooperation in Multiple Agent Systems
In this paper, we divide the cooperation in multiple agent systems into task-based cooperation and information-based cooperation. We describe information-based cooperation as information synthesizing and decision making. To implement information synthesizing, agents' beliefs are decomposed into two levels. The higher level represents the possible information, and the lower level subsequently estimates a number function for the belief by synthesizing the possible information.
10875476
Affinity relation discovery in image database clustering and content-based retrieval
In this paper, we propose a unified framework, called <i>Markov Model Mediator</i> (MMM), to facilitate image database clustering and to improve the query performance. The structure of the MMM framework consists of two hierarchical levels: local MMMs and integrated MMMs, which model the affinity relations among the images within a single image database and within a set of image databases, respectively, via an effective data mining process. The effectiveness and efficiency of the MMM framework for database clustering and image retrieval are demonstrated over a set of image databases which contain various numbers of images with different dimensions and concept categories.