Cover Songs Retrieval and Identification

Cover songs retrieval is a MIR task that has been widely studied
in the recent years. The task, in its general sense, consists in
retrieving covers for a given audio query. In this PhD, we focus
on the more specific task of cover songs *identification*. Given
an unknown cover song query, we want to find relevant information
about the original song, such as the title, the artist etc.
Applications are live music recognition, plagiarism detections,
query by examples, etc. Our approach is based on a pruning algorithm,
whose role is to discard as quickly as possible as many tracks as
possible from a search database in order to keep a smaller subset
that should contain the tracks relevant to the query. We introduce
the concept of *rejectors* for the pruning algorithm, which are
single or combined classifier using multiple audio features for
selecting relevant tracks.