2007 Articles

Evaluation Distance Measures Between Gaussian Mixture Models of MFCCs

Jensen, Jesper Hojvang; Ellis, Daniel P. W.; Christensen, Mads G.; Jensen, Soren Holdt

In music similarity and in the related task of genre classification, a distance measure between Gaussian mixture models is frequently needed. We present a comparison of the Kullback-Leibler distance, the earth movers distance and the normalized L2 distance for this application. Although the normalized L2 distance was slightly inferior to the Kullback-Leibler distance with respect to classification performance, it has the advantage of obeying the triangle inequality, which allows for efficient searching.