Cover song retrieval: A comparative study of system component choices

The Cover Song Retrieval (CSR) problem has received considerable attention in the MIREX 2006-2008 evaluation sessions. While the reported performance figures provide a general idea about the strengths of the submitted systems, it is not clear what actually causes the reported performance of a certain system. In other words, the question arises whether some system component design choices are more critical for a system's performance results than others. In order to obtain a better understanding of the performance of current CSR approaches and to give recommendations for future research in the field of CSR, we designed and performed a comparative study involving system component design approaches from the best-performing systems in MIREX 2006 and 2007. The datasets used for evaluation were carefully chosen to cover the broad spectrum of the cover song domain, while still providing designated test cases. While the choice of the dissimilarity assessment method was found to cause the largest CSR performance boost and very good retrieval results were obtained on classical opus retrieval cases, results obtained on a new test case, involving recordings originating from different microphone sets, point out new challenges in optimizing the feature representation step.