Contents Analysis and Synthesis Scheme for Music Album Cover Art

Most recent web search engines perform effective keyword-based multimedia contents retrieval by investigating keywords associated with multimedia contents on the Web and comparing them with query keywords. On the other hand, most music and compilation albums provide professional artwork as cover art that will be displayed when the music is played. If the cover art is not available, then the music player just displays some dummy or random images, but this has been a source of dissatisfaction. In this paper, in order to automatically create cover art that is matched with music contents, we propose a music album cover art creation scheme based on music contents analysis and result synthesis. We first (i) analyze music contents and their lyrics and extract representative keywords, (ii) expand the keywords using WordNet and generate various queries, (iii) retrieve related images from the Web using those queries, and finally (iv) synthesize them according to the user preference for album cover art. To show the effectiveness of our scheme, we developed a prototype system and reported some results.