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