Query by Example Methods for Audio Signals

Various methods for query by example for audio signals are discussed in this paper. The query by example aims at automatic retrieval of audio excerpts similar to a user-provided audio sample from his/her personal audio database. Methods based on hidden Markov models, feature histograms, and likelihood ratio test are discussed. A class based approach was adopted in defining the concept of similarity between two audio samples. For this reason two databases were constructed for the simulations. Experiments were carried out by using a high quality audio database and an audio database collected with a mobile phone. Considering the difficulty of the task the results are quite encouraging also from the future research point of view