Now Playing: Continuous low-power music recognition
This enables privacy-respecting, always-on music recognition on mobile devices for users, though it is incremental in optimizing existing recognition methods for efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of server-dependent music recognition by developing a low-power, on-device system that continuously detects and identifies music without user interaction, achieving less than 1% daily battery usage on average.
Existing music recognition applications require a connection to a server that performs the actual recognition. In this paper we present a low-power music recognizer that runs entirely on a mobile device and automatically recognizes music without user interaction. To reduce battery consumption, a small music detector runs continuously on the mobile device's DSP chip and wakes up the main application processor only when it is confident that music is present. Once woken, the recognizer on the application processor is provided with a few seconds of audio which is fingerprinted and compared to the stored fingerprints in the on-device fingerprint database of tens of thousands of songs. Our presented system, Now Playing, has a daily battery usage of less than 1% on average, respects user privacy by running entirely on-device and can passively recognize a wide range of music.