Complexity-scalable beat detection with MP3 audio bitstreams

Abstract

A scheme of complexity-scalable beat detection of popular music recordings that can run different platforms, particularly battery-powered handheld devices has been presented. The detector complexity can be adjusted to match the constraints of the device and user requirements. The use of Huffman bits from the compressed bitstream is use without requiring any decoding as the sole feature for onset detection. An efficient and robust graph-based beat induction algorithm is also provided. By applying the beat detector to compressed rather than uncompressed audio, the system execution time can be reduced by almost three orders of magnitude. The algorithm was implemented and tested on a targeted personal digital assistants (PDA) platform. The compressed and transform-domain processing are particularly suitable for mobile applications, providing a satisfactory tradeoff between detection accuracy and execution speed.