Implementation of a practical query-by-singing/humming (QbSH) system and its commercial applications

In this paper, a practical query-bysinging/humming (QbSH) system is proposed that uses polyphonic music tracks such as MP3 and AAC files to create the reference database (DB) unlike conventional QbSH systems. To create the reference DB, we propose a method for melody extraction from polyphonic music signals based on harmonic structure. In addition, we propose a matching engine using modified dynamic time warping (DTW) that uses chroma-scale representation and asymmetric path of DTW to reduce the influence of melody extraction error. We implemented three different prototypes for its commercial applications like smart phone, laptop and karaoke. We evaluated the performance of the proposed practical QbSH system with monophonic and polyphonic music datasets, and confirmed that it has an acceptable performance for commercial applications.