Measuring the Performance of Beat Tracking Algorithms Using a Beat Error Histogram

Author

Davies, Matthew E P ; Degara, Norberto ; Plumbley, Mark D.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electron. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Queen Mary Univ. of London, London, UK

Volume

18

Issue

3

fYear

2011

fDate

3/1/2011 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

157

Lastpage

160

Abstract

We present a new evaluation method for measuring the performance of musical audio beat tracking systems. Central to our method is a novel visualization, the beat error histogram, which illustrates the metrical relationship between two qausi-periodic sequences of time instants: the output of beat tracking system and a set of ground truth annotations. To quantify beat tracking performance we derive an information theoretic statistic from the histogram. Results indicate that our method is able to measure performance with greater precision than existing evaluation methods and implicitly cater for metrical ambiguity in tapping sequences.

Keywords

information retrieval; music; tracking; beat error histogram; beat tracking algorithm; evaluation method; ground truth annotation; information theoretic statistic; metrical ambiguity; musical audio beat tracking system; performance measurement; qausi periodic sequence; tapping sequence; time instant; Accuracy; Entropy; Gain measurement; Histograms; Measurement uncertainty; Timing; Visualization; Beat tracking; evaluation; music information retrieval;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Signal Processing Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1070-9908

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LSP.2010.2102018

Filename

5674069