11937214
A Query-by-Singing Technique for Retrieving Polyphonic Objects of Popular Music
This paper investigates the problem of retrieving popular music by singing. In contrast to the retrieval of MIDI music, which is easy to acquire the main melody by the selection of the symbolic tracks, retrieving polyphonic objects in CD or MP3 format requires to extract the main melody directly from the accompanied singing signals, which proves difficult to handle well simply using the conventional pitch estimation. To reduce the interference of background accompaniments during the main melody extraction, methods are proposed to estimate the underlying sung notes in a music recording by taking into account the characteristic structure of popular song. In addition, to accommodate users’ unprofessional or personal singing styles, methods are proposed to handle the inaccuracies of tempo, pause, transposition, or off-key, etc., inevitably existing in queries. The proposed system has been evaluated on a music database consisting of 2613 phrases extracted manually from 100 Mandarin pop songs. The experimental results indicate the feasibility of retrieving pop songs by singing.
8726769
A Prototypes-Embedded Genetic K-means Algorithm
This paper presents a genetic algorithm (GA) for K-means clustering. Instead of the widely applied string-of-group-numbers encoding, we encode the prototypes of the clusters into the chromosomes. The crossover operator is designed to exchange prototypes between two chromosomes. The one-step K-means algorithm is used as the mutation operator. Hence, the proposed GA is called the prototypes-embedded genetic K-means algorithm (PGKA). With the inherent evolution process of evolutionary algorithms, PGKA has superior performance than the classical K-means algorithm, while comparing to other GA-based approaches, PGKA is more efficient and suitable for large scale data sets
10755440
Syllable-Based Chinese Text/Spoken Document Retrieval Using Text/Speech Queries
In light of the rapid growth of Chinese information resources on the Internet, this study investigates a novel approach that deals with the problem of Chinese text and spoken document retrieval using both text and speech queries. By properly utilizing the monosyllabic structure of the Chinese language, the proposed approach estimates the statistical similarity between the text/speech queries and the text/spoken documents at the phonetic level using the syllable-based statistical information. The investigation successfully implemented a prototype system with an interface supporting some user-friendly functions and the initial test results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
34060618
A Minimum Boundary Error Framework for Automatic Phonetic Segmentation
This paper presents a novel framework for HMM-based automatic phonetic segmentation that improves the accuracy of placing phone boundaries. In the framework, both training and segmentation approaches are proposed according to the minimum boundary error (MBE) criterion, which tries to minimize the expected boundary errors over a set of possible phonetic alignments. This framework is inspired by the recently proposed minimum phone error (MPE) training approach and the minimum Bayes risk decoding algorithm for automatic speech recognition. To evaluate the proposed MBE framework, we conduct automatic phonetic segmentation experiments on the TIMIT acoustic-phonetic continuous speech corpus. MBE segmentation with MBE-trained models can identify 80.53% of human-labeled phone boundaries within a tolerance of 10 ms, compared to 71.10% identified by conventional ML segmentation with ML-trained models. Moreover, by using the MBE framework, only 7.15% of automatically labeled phone boundaries have errors larger than 20 ms.
24553
Mandarin-English Information (MEI): investigating translingual speech retrieval
Abstract This paper describes the Mandarin–English Information (MEI) project, where we investigated the problem of cross-language spoken document retrieval (CL-SDR), and developed one of the first English–Chinese CL-SDR systems. Our system accepts an entire English news story (text) as query, and retrieves relevant Chinese broadcast news stories (audio) from the document collection. Hence, this is a cross-language and cross-media retrieval task. We applied a multi-scale approach to our problem, which unifies the use of phrases, words and subwords in retrieval. The English queries are translated into Chinese by means of a dictionary-based approach, where we have integrated phrase-based translation with word-by-word translation. Untranslatable named entities are transliterated by a novel subword translation technique. The multi-scale approach can be divided into three subtasks – multi-scale query formulation, multi-scale audio indexing (by speech recognition) and multi-scale retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that the use of phrase-based translation and subword translation gave performance gains, and multi-scale retrieval outperforms word-based retrieval.
2984995
Query-By-Example Technique for Retrieving Cover Versions of Popular Songs with Similar Melodies
Retrieving audio material based on audio queries is an important and challenging issue in the research field of content-based access to popular music. As part of this research field, we present a preliminary investigation into retrieving cover versions of songs specified by users. The technique enables users to listen to songs with an identical tune, but performed by different singers, in different languages, genres, and so on. The proposed system is built on a query-by-example framework, which takes a fragment of the song submitted by the user as input, and returns songs similar to the query in terms of the main melody as output. To handle the likely discrepancies, e.g., tempos, transpositions, and accompaniments between cover versions and the original song, methods are presented to remove the non-vocal portions of the song, extract the sung notes from the accompanied vocals, and compare the similarities between the sung note sequences.
46507144
FARM: a framework for exploring mining spaces with multiple attributes
Mining for frequent itemsets typically involves a preprocessing step in which data with multiple attributes are grouped into transactions, and items are defined based on attribute values. We hake observed that such fixed attribute mining can severely constrain the patterns that are discovered. Herein, we introduce mining spaces, a new framework for mining multi-attribute data that includes the discovery of transaction and item definitions (with the exploitation of taxonomies and functional dependencies if they are available). We prove that special downward closure properties (or anti-monotonic property) hold for mining spaces, a result that allows us to construct efficient algorithms for mining patterns without the constraints of fixed attribute mining. We apply our algorithms to real world data collected from a production computer network. The results show that by exploiting the special kinds of downward closure in mining spaces, execution times for mining can be reduced by a factor of three to four.
2318961
A Novel Robust Statistical Method for Background Initialization and Visual Surveillance
In many visual tracking and surveillance systems, it is important to initialize a background model using a training video sequence which may include foreground objects. In such a case, robust statistical methods are required to handle random occurrences of foreground objects (i.e., outliers), as well as general image noise. The robust statistical method Median has been employed for initializing the background model. However, the Median can tolerate up to only 50% outliers, which cannot satisfy the requirements of some complicated environments. In this paper, we propose a novel robust method for the background initialization. The proposed method can tolerate more than 50% of foreground pixels and noise. We give quantitative evaluations on a number of video sequences and compare our proposed method with five other methods. Experiments show that our method can achieve very promising results in background initialization: including applications in video segmentation, visual tracking and surveillance.
7895439
An efficient rate-distortion optimal shape coding approach utilizing a skeleton-based decomposition
In this paper, we present a new shape-coding approach, which decouples the shape information into two independent signal data sets; the skeleton and the boundary distance from the skeleton. The major benefit of this approach is that it allows for a more flexible tradeoff between approximation error and bit budget. Curves of arbitrary order can be utilized for approximating both the skeleton and distance signals. For a given bit budget for a video frame, we solve the problem of choosing the number and location of the control points for all skeleton and distance signals of all boundaries within a frame, so that the overall distortion is minimized. An operational rate-distortion (ORD) optimal approach using Lagrangian relaxation and a four-dimensional direct acyclic graph (DAG) shortest path algorithm is developed for solving the problem. To reduce the computational complexity from O(N(5)) to O(N(3)), where N is the number of admissible control points for a skeleton, a suboptimal greedy-trellis search algorithm is proposed and compared with the optimal algorithm. In addition, an even more efficient algorithm with computational complexity O(N(2)) that finds an ORD optimal solution using a relaxed distortion criterion is also proposed and compared with the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform existing ORD optimal approaches, which do not follow the same decomposition of the source data.
1232229
Active Mining of Data Streams
Most previously proposed mining methods on data streams make an unrealistic assumption that “labelled” data stream is readily available and can be mined at anytime. However, in most real-world problems, labelled data streams are rarely immediately available. Due to this reason, models are refreshed periodically, that is usually synchronized with data availability schedule. There are several undesirable consequences of this “passive periodic refresh”. In this paper, we propose a new concept of demand-driven active data mining. It estimates the error of the model on the new data stream without knowing the true class labels. When significantly higher error is suspected, it investigates the true class labels of a selected number of examples in the most recent data stream to verify the suspected higher error. 1 State-of-the-art Stream Mining State-of-the-art work on mining data streams concentrates on capturing time-evolving trends and patterns with “labeled” data. However, one important aspect that is often ignored or unrealistically assumed is the availability of “class labels” of data streams. Most algorithms make an implicit and impractical assumption that labeled data is readily available. Most works focus on how to detect the change in patterns and how to update the model to reflect such changes when there are “labelled” instances to be learned. However, for many applications, the class labels are not “immediately” available unless dedicated efforts and substantial costs are spent to investigate these labels right away. If the true class labels were readily available, data mining models would not be very useful we might just wait. In credit card fraud detection, we usually do not know if a particular transaction is a fraud until at least one month later after the account holder receives and reviews the monthly statement. Due to these facts, most current applications obtain class labels and update existing models in preset frequency, usually synchronized with data refresh. The effectiveness of the passive mode is dictated by some “statuary and static constraints”, yet not by the “demand” for a better model with a lower loss. Such a passive mode to mine data streams results in a number of potential undesirable consequences that contradict the notions of “streaming” and “continuous”. First, it may incur possibly higher loss due to neglected pattern drifts. If either the concept or data distribution drifts rapidly at an un-forecasted rate that statuary constraints do not catch up, the models are likely to be out-of-date on the data stream and important business opportunities might be missed. Second, it may have unnecessary model refresh. If there is neither conceptual nor distributional change, periodic passive model refresh and re-validation is a waste of resources. 1.1 Demand-driven Active Mining of Data Streams We are proposing a demand-driven active stream data mining process that solves the problems of passive stream data mining. As a summary, our particular implementation of active stream data mining has three simple steps: 1. Detect potential changes of data streams “on the fly” when the existing model classifies continuous data streams. The detection process does not use or know any true labels of the stream. One of the change detection methods is a “guess” of the actual loss or error rate of the model on the new data stream. 2. If the guessed loss or error rate of the model in step 1 is much higher than an application-specific tolerable maximum, we choose a small number of data records in the new data stream to investigate their true class labels. With these true class labels, we statistically estimate the true loss of the model. 3. If the statistically estimated loss in step 2 is verified to be higher than the tolerable maximum, we reconstruct the old model by using the same true class labels sampled in the previous step. In this paper, we concentrate on the first two steps. Our particular implementation extends on classification trees.
14477369
Markov random field modeled range image segmentation
In this paper, range image segmentation is studied in the framework of the maximum a posteriori estimation and Markov random field modeling. A novel range image segmentation model is proposed. The model serves as an evaluator for a small number of segmentation candidates obtained through a fast edge detection algorithm. A local method is employed to search for the optimal segmentation from the candidates. Experimental results show that such combination of heuristics and model-based evaluation leads to a fast and accurate segmentation.