Automatic Song Identification in Noisy Broadcast Audio

Automatic identification of music titles and copyright enforcement of audio material has become a topic of great interest. One of the main problems with broadcast audio is that the received audio suffers several transformations before reaching the listener (equalizations, noise, speaker over the audio, parts of the songs are changed or removed, etc.) and, therefore, the original and the broadcast songs are very different from a signal point of view.

In this paper, we present a new method to minimize the effects of audio manipulation (i.e. radio edits) and distortions due to broadcast transmissions. With this method, the identification system is able to correctly recognize small fragments of music embedded in continuous streams of audio (radio broadcast as well as Internet radio) and therefore generate full play-lists. Since the main goal of this system is copyright enforcement, the system has been designed to give almost no false positives and a very high accuracy.