On the Use of Entropy for Beat Tracking Evaluation

Despite continued attention toward the problem of automatic beat detection in musical audio, the issue of how to evaluate beat tracking systems remains pertinent and controversial. As yet no consistent evaluation metric has been adopted by the research community. To this aim, we propose a new method for beat tracking evaluation by measuring beat accuracy in terms of the entropy of a beat error histogram. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to address several shortcomings of existing methods.