detection

This paper describes a new music-playback interface for trial listening, SmartMusicKIOSK. In music stores, short trial listening of CD music is not usually a passive experience -- customers often search out the chorus or "hook" of a song using the fast-forward button. Listening of this type, however, has not been traditionally supported. This research achieves a function for jumping to the chorus section and other key parts of a song plus a function for visualizing song structure. These functions make it easier for a listener to find desired parts of a song and thereby facilitate an active listening experience. The proposed functions are achieved by an automatic chorus-section detecting method, and the results of implementing them as a listening station have demonstrated their usefulness.

Thumbnail images provide users of image retrieval and browsing systems with a method for quickly scanning large numbers of images. Recognizing the objects in an image is important in many retrieval tasks, but thumbnails generated by shrinking the original image often render objects illegible. We study the ability of computer vision systems to detect key components of images so that automated cropping, prior to shrinking, can render objects more recognizable. We evaluate automatic cropping techniques 1) based on a general method that detects salient portions of images, and 2) based on automatic face detection. Our user study shows that these methods result in small thumbnails that are substantially more recognizable and easier to find in the context of visual search.