Interactive user correction of automatically detected onsets: approach and evaluation

Onset detection still has room for improvement, especially when dealing with polyphonic music signals. For certain purposes in which the correctness of the result is a must, user intervention is hence required to correct the mistakes performed by the detection algorithm. In such interactive paradigm, the exactitude of the detection can be guaranteed at the expense of user’s work, being the effort required to accomplish the task, the value that has to be both quantified and reduced. The present work studies the idea of interactive onset detection and proposes a methodology for assessing the user’s workload, as well as a set of interactive schemes for reducing such workload when carrying out this detection task. Results show that the evaluation strategy proposed is able to quantitatively assess the invested user effort. Also, the presented interactive schemes significantly facilitate the correction task compared with the manual annotation.