A method for direct audio search with applications to indexing and retrieval

A technique for searching audio data to find an exact match for a given piece of cue-audio is described. The method uses a cepstral parameterisation of the audio and a covariance-based distance metric to quickly locate direct repeats. Results on data from ABC news broadcasts show that the method can successfully locate matches several hundred times faster than real-time and requires less than a second of cue-audio. By applying the match recursively to the data, repeated sections of audio, which nearly always correspond to non-news items such as commercials and theme-music, can be identified. Experiments show that the application of the technique can also lead to improved information retrieval using automatically transcribed broadcast data.