Enhancing music information retrieval by incorporating image-based local features

This paper presents a novel approach to music genre classification. Having represented music tracks in the form of two dimensional images, we apply the "bag of visual words" method from visual IR in order to classify the songs into 19 genres. By switching to visual domain, we can abstract from musical concepts such as melody, timbre and rhythm. We obtained classification accuracy of 46% (with 5% theoretical baseline for random classification) which is comparable with existing state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the novel features characterize different properties of the signal than standard methods. Therefore, the combination of them should further improve the performance of existing techniques. The motivation behind this work was the hypothesis, that 2D images of music tracs (spectrograms) perceived as similar would correspond to the same music genres. Conversely, it is possible to treat real life images as spectrograms and utilize music-based features to represent these images in a vector form. This points to an interesting interchangeability between visual and music information retrieval.