Query by humming via multiscale transportation distance in random query occurrence context

Query by humming (QBH) is an interactive tool for retrieving favored songs from a large database of known media via acoustic input. In this task, common method for measuring similarity between query and candidate is either by symbolic notation distance or by framed based dynamic programming. However, the former has disadvantage of error-prone to the noted symbolic feature extraction stage, while the latter is time-consuming. It has been proved that transportation distance has its remarkable merit in image query. However, we adopt a new structure for handling QBH, which is based on an improved version of this measure in combination with a string searching algorithm. More practically, we extend this method in random piece context, which means users can hum at any part of music piece. Experimental results are evaluated in MIREX 2007. Final 92.82% MRR has shown its significant advantages.