Enhancing Cover Song Identification with Hierarchical Rank Aggregation

Cover song identification involves calculating pairwise similarities between a query audio track and a database of reference tracks. While most authors make exclusively use of chroma features, recent work tends to demonstrate that combining similarity estimators based on multiple audio features increases the performance. We improve this approach by using a hierarchical rank aggregation method for combining estimators based on different features. More precisely, we first aggregate estimators based on global features such as the tempo, the duration, the overall loudness, the number of beats, and the average chroma vector. Then, we aggregate the resulting composite estimator with four popular state-of-the-art methods based on chromas as well as timbre sequences. We further introduce a refinement step for the rank aggregation called “local Kemenization” and quantify its benefit for cover song identification. The performance of our method is evaluated on the Second Hand Song dataset. Our experiments show a significant improvement of the performance, up to an increase of more than 200% of the number of queries identified in the Top-1, compared to previous results.