Segmentation of music video streams in music pieces through audio-visual analysis

Today, technologies for information storage and transmission allow the creation and development of huge databases of multimedia content. Tools are needed to facilitate their access and browsing. In this context, this article focuses on the segmentation of a particular category of multimedia content, audio-visual musical streams, into music pieces. This category includes concert audio-video recordings, and sequences of music videos such as the ones found in musical TV channels. Current approaches consist in supervised clustering in a few audio classes (music, speech, noise), and, to our knowledge, no consistent evaluation has been performed yet in the case of audio-visual musical streams. In this paper, we aim at estimating the temporal boundaries of music pieces relying on the assumed homogeneity of their musical and visual properties. We consider an unsupervised approach based on the generalized likelihood ratio to evaluate the presence of statistical breakdowns of MFCCs, Chroma vectors, dominant Hue and Lightness over time. An evaluation of this approach on 15 manually annotated concert streams shows the advantage of combining tonal content features to timbral ones, and a modest impact from the joint use of visual features in boundary estimation.