Adaptive whitening for Improved Real-Time audio onset Detection

We describe a new method for preprocessing STFT phasevocoder frames for improved performance in real-time onset detection, which we term "adaptive whitening". The procedure involves normalising the magnitude of each bin according to a recent maximum value for that bin, with the aim of allowing each bin to achieve a similar dynamic range over time, which helps to mitigate against the influence of spectral roll-off and strongly-varying dynamics. Adaptive whitening requires no training, is relatively lightweight to compute, and can run in real-time. Yet it can improve onset detector performance by more than ten percentage points (peak F-measure) in some cases, and improves the performance of most of the onset detectors tested. We present results demonstrating that adaptive whitening can significantly improve the performance of various STFT-based onset detection functions, including functions based on the power, spectral flux, phase deviation, and complex deviation measures. Our results find the process to be especially beneficial for certain types of audio signal (e.g. complex mixtures such as pop music).

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