Smart Audio Access to Multimedia Information

Intuitive and efficient access to multimedia information is becoming a strategic option, given the increasing availability of such information in large archives and on the web. Audio information is a powerful medium to communicate naturally with such systems, while accessing multimedia information semantically. To this end, we are integrating multiple signal-processing algorithms and soft computing to develop an audio-based front end for multimedia retrieval. Algorithm-based feature extraction is used to feed a Kohonen feature map and a fuzzy-logic classifier to develop a content-based, audio-access system that retrieves information in a multimedia domain.