Query by humming: matching humming query to polyphonic audio

Previously a great attention has been paid to content-based multimedia retrieval that enables users to find and locate audio-visual material according to the intrinsic characteristics of the target. Query by humming (QBH) is also an application that makes retrieval according to major characteristics of music, that is, "melody". Our focus is on the realization of query-by-humming technology for easy-to-use application, which entails full automation of all the processes of the system, including melody information extraction from polyphonic audio. This paper presents developed algorithms for key steps of a QBH system including the melody feature extraction method from polyphonic audio and humming, their representation for matching, and matching method between the represented melody information from polyphonic audio and humming.