Efficient audio-driven multimedia indexing through similarity-based speech/music discrimination

In this paper, an audio-driven algorithm for the detection of speech and music events in multimedia content is introduced. The proposed approach is based on the hypothesis that short-time frame-level discrimination performance can be enhanced by identifying transition points between longer, semantically homogeneous segments of audio. In this context, a two-step segmentation approach is employed in order to initially identify transition points between the homogeneous regions and subsequently classify the derived segments using a supervised binary classifier. The transition point detection mechanism is based on the analysis and composition of multiple self-similarity matrices, generated using different audio feature sets. The implemented technique aims at discriminating events focusing on transition point detection with high temporal resolution, a target that is also reflected in the adopted assessment methodology. Thereafter, multimedia indexing can be efficiently deployed (for both audio and video sequences), incorporating the processes of high resolution temporal segmentation and semantic annotation extraction. The system is evaluated against three publicly available datasets and experimental results are presented in comparison with existing implementations. The proposed algorithm is provided as an open source software package in order to support reproducible research and encourage collaboration in the field.