Analysis of the data quality of audio descriptions of environmental sounds

In this paper we perform statistical data analysis of a broad set of state-of-the-art audio features and low-level MPEG-7 audio descriptors. The investigation comprises data analysis to reveal redundancies between state-of-the-art audio features and MPEG-7 audio descriptors. We introduce a novel measure to evaluate the information content of a descriptor in terms of variance. Statistical data analysis reveals the amount of variance contained in a feature. It enables identification of independent and redundant features. This approach assists in efficient selection of orthogonal features for content-based retrieval. We believe that a good feature should provide descriptions with high variance for the underlying data. Combinations of features should consist of decorrelated features in order to increase expressiveness of the descriptions. Although MPEG-7 is a popular and widely used standard for multimedia description, only few investigations do exist that address analysis of the data quality of low-level MPEG-7 descriptions.