Enhancing Sampling and Counting Method for Audio Retrieval with Time-Stretch Resistance

An ideal audio retrieval method should be not only highly efficient in identifying an audio track from a massive audio dataset, but also robust to any distortion. Unfortunately, none of the audio retrieval methods is robust to all types of distortions. An audio retrieval method has to do with both the audio fingerprint and the strategy, especially how they are combined. We argue that the Sampling and Counting Method (SC), a state-of-the-art audio retrieval method, would be promising towards an ideal audio retrieval method, if we could make it robust to time-stretch and pitch-stretch. Towards this objective, this paper proposes a turning point alignment method to enhance SC with resistance to time-stretch, which makes Philips and Philips-like fingerprints resist to time-stretch. Experimental results show that our approach can resist to time-stretch from 70% to 130%, which is on a par to the state-of-the-art methods. It also marginally improves the retrieval performance with various noise distortions.