Quick audio retrieval using active search

This paper discusses a method to search quickly through broadcast audio data to detect and locate known sounds using reference templates, based on the active search algorithm and histogram modeling of zero-crossing features. Active search reduces the number of candidate matches between reference and test template by up to 36 times compared to exhaustive search, while still remaining optimal. Computation is further reduced by using computationally inexpensive zero-crossing features. The method is robust against white noise addition down to 20dB signal-to-noise ratios and digitization noise.