Mobile ringtone search through query by humming

In the context of voice-based mobile search, this paper presents a new approach to mobile ringtone search through query by humming: A user can call a service, hum a part of melody through the mobile phone, and obtain the ringtones or songs he or she is looking for. Correspondingly, we propose a method of query by humming tailored to this scenario. A robust front-end processing is first presented to deal with the mobile phone recording, which is distorted due to GSM codec, environment and wireless transmission. Then, a systematic probabilistic model and matching procedure inspired by hidden Markov model (HMM) is presented, by considering the alignment and error tolerance in the matching between query and songs. A rescoring heuristic is finally employed to further improve matching accuracy. Moreover, our system is evaluated on realistic mobile recordings from the field. Experiments show our approach can achieve 83% accuracy on a database with 3000 songs in this realistic scenario.