Musicover

Final Project Proposal

Li Guanchen, Gavin
Wei Tengjie, Jay
Zhou Junhong, Calvin
2012/12/1

Final Project Proposal

ELTU1111 Technical Communication 2012-2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Executive Summary ................................................................................................... 2
2. Introduction............................................................................................................... 2
2.1. General Background ........................................................................................... 2
2.2. Problem Observation ......................................................................................... 3
3. Problem Analysis ....................................................................................................... 3
3.1. Needs Analysis ................................................................................................... 3
3.2. Existing Products ................................................................................................ 4
3.3. Proposed Approach ............................................................................................ 5
4. Product Details .......................................................................................................... 6
4.1. Product Overview ............................................................................................... 6
4.2. Function Implementation and Feasibility .......................................................... 7
4.2.1. Photo Recognition ....................................................................................... 8
4.2.2. Locating Users ............................................................................................. 9
4.2.3. Relevant Information Retrieval ................................................................. 10
4.2.4. Other functions and Integration ............................................................... 11
4.3. User Interface ................................................................................................... 11
4.3.1. Principle of Design .................................................................................... 11
4.3.2. Prototype and Sample............................................................................... 11
4.4. Testing .............................................................................................................. 13
4.4.1. Hardware Requirement ............................................................................. 13
4.4.2. Testing Approach ....................................................................................... 14
5. Goals and Impact..................................................................................................... 14
6. Costs ........................................................................................................................ 15
6.1. Labor Costs ....................................................................................................... 15
6.2. Development Tools Costs ................................................................................. 15
6.3. Promotion Costs ............................................................................................... 15
7. Profit Model ............................................................................................................ 15
8. Potential Risks and Solutions .................................................................................. 16
8.1. Algorithm Failure .............................................................................................. 16
8.2. Information Collection Failure ......................................................................... 16
9. Project Schedule ...................................................................................................... 17
10.Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 17
Reference ..................................................................................................................... 18
Appendix AQuestionnaire ........................................................................................ 19
Appendix BSchedule ................................................................................................ 21

Final Project Proposal

ELTU1111 Technical Communication 2012-2013

1. Executive Summary
This proposal is committed to provide a feasible and simple solution for
customers of physical music stores to retrieve relevant information of specific albums.
Customer survey was conducted to analyze the market and study customers needs,
while some existing products and research paper were examined to select proper
technologies.
Our proposed solution is Musicover, an application on mobile devices. It
implement the method of image processing and comparison to accomplish album
recognition while corresponding album introduction, previews, users comments and
price information shall be retrieved from database on the internet. With the help of
Musicover, great improvement of user experience in physical music stores is
promising.

2. Introduction
2.1. General Background
The Hong Kong Government always puts emphasis on promoting and
developing

innovative

technological

inventions

so

that

to

remain

the

competitiveness of Hong Kongs economy and influence in international markets. As

a result, the Hong Kong Productivity Council <http://www.hkpc.org/> has organized
a Creative Design Contest (CDC) to gather creative ideas and promote innovative
product design and technologies in the local community.
We are students from the Faculty of Engineering of the Chinese University of
Hong Kong. In response to this Creative Design Contest, we propose to develop an
application on mobile devices aimed at recognizing album by covers and providing
relevant information for users.

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2.2. Problem Observation

A quick brainstorm initiates our observation of scenarios in physical music stores.
First, it is very common to see customers hesitating to buy an album held in hands,
since they can only decide based on its cover due to the few CD players in stores and
the long queue waiting for previewing music. Secondly, relevant information and
comments from others are hard to access in a physical store, even internet makes
searching them possible. Lastly, people also desire to compare prices of an album in
different stores before they decide to purchase it, while it takes time to visit music
store one by one.
These observations stimulate us to improve user experience in physical music
stores. Considering the operational costs of stores, we decided to utilize the
convenience of mobile devices and the power of the internet to reach this goal.

3. Problem Analysis
3.1. Needs Analysis
To confirm the needs in the scenario described above, we conducted survey by
handing out questionnaire to customers and interviewing selected respondents. The
questionnaire concerns mainly on consumer behavior in physical music stores and
existing mobile applications. Full Sample questionnaire is available in Appendix A.
Among 49 valid returned questionnaires, 77.5% of the respondents think that
the preview service provided by physical music store is not enough, while 85.7% of
them state that they prefer previewing before buying audio and video products. At
the same time, the majority of the respondents agree that comments from other
customers (34.7%), artists introduction (22.4%) and recommendation from music
critics (44.9%) will affect their consumption. In addition, 63.3% of the respondents
want to compare prices of different stores including physical ones and digital ones.
However, most of the respondents are not satisfied with the current services
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provided by mobile applications.

In summary, what customers really need is a simple convenient solution to
preview music and retrieve relevant information, especially using their cellphones or
tablets.

3.2. Existing Products

Across different platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone, numerous
applications have been designed to improve user experience in searching, listening,
sharing and even composing music.
We analyze two most representative applications aimed at searching music but
with different approach. Hunter uses the traditional way of manually enter the
keywords to search artists or songs, while SoundHound provide a much easier way to
search music by inputting a piece of music clip utter the keywords to the microphone
of devices. Table 1 shows more details. Applications featuring of barcode or
two-dimensional code recognition can also be found, yet none of them are optimized
for searching music.
Back to the music store scenario, these existing music applications do not fully
meet the users needs, because when customers want to preview a music album,
which means no sound clips are available at hand, searching via music clips fails
automatically. Furthermore, to read the name of an album or artists may not be easy,
whether it is because stores are too noisy for the application to identify the voice, or
words printed in art font are difficult to recognize or even some names are difficult to
pronounce, such as Maroon5. On the other hand, price information is essential in
this scenario, which most applications do not provide, not mention to display prices
in different stores with their location in a map.
In conclusion, there is room for improvement in both searching music and
relevant information providing.

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Table 1.

ELTU1111 Technical Communication 2012-2013

Two Music Applications

Hunter

SoundHound

Platform

iOS

Searching Method

Keywords via typing

Preview
Artists Introduction
Price Information
User Comments
Link to Digital
Music Store
Sharing on Social
Network
Tagging Favorite Music
Music Recommendation

Yes
Yes
No
No

iOS/Android/
Windows Phone/Symbian
Music Clips/
Keywords via voice
Yes
Yes
No
Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes
Yes

Yes
Yes

3.3. Proposed Approach

We now propose an application named Musicover, whose music searching
function is accomplished via recognizing the album cover. We envision that users
need only take a photo of the music album cover, and then the application will find
that album in database by comparing photos.
Compared with existing music application, Musicover will greatly enhance
searching efficiency for three reasons. Firstly, it avoids users manually typing or
reading keywords, but uses a faster approach by taking photos. Secondly, album
covers are almost unique and easy to identify, while keyword search usually returns
multiple results and need to further confirm. Thirdly, customers of physical music
store are more interested in a whole album rather than single pieces of songs when
they are considering purchasing CDs. Unlike other applications that search songs and
then trace to the whole album, Musicover gives search result in album-based directly.

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4. Product Details
4.1. Product Overview
Musicover is proposed to be a multi-platform application, while different
versions for different platforms will be developed and launched continuously. Main
features and a usual using process are as follows.
Musicover provides two modes, the search mode and the browse mode, for
users to appoint one target album and then retrieve related information. In the
search mode, either a photo of album cover or a search keyword can initiate a search.
Users then select the correct album from returned results. Alternatively, users can
turn to the browse mode and select an album from a browsing list created according
to music style, popularity or other classification schemes. The application will then
provide introduction to the album, rating and comments from other users, and
previews of songs. Users can further share music on a social network such as twitter
and Facebook, or link to digital music stores to purchase the album. Price information
of current and nearby physical stores will be displayed on maps embedded in the
application together with the location of users. Figure 1 showcases a prospective
flowchart of the above functionalities.

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Figure 1. Flowchart of Musicover

4.2. Function Implementation and Feasibility

As described above, the major function to be built in Musicover are photo
recognition for identifying albums, retrieve relevant information of albums and
locating users to display suitable physical store. Each function has several
corresponding readily available technologies, from which we will choose proper ones
to adopt according to their performance and the costs of implementation. Essentials
of these technologies are as follows

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4.2.1. Photo Recognition

Photo recognition is the core technology of Musicover. The basic idea is to
generate a characteristic code for each photos stored in the album cover database
and photos taken by users. By comparing these different codes, we shall be able to
find the most matching results. Hence this problem is decomposed into two parts,
characteristic codes generation and codes matching criteria.
Figure 2Characteristic Code Generation

Characteristic Code
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 7 4 5 5 7 8 4 3 8 5 11 5 6 12 7 2 4 3 8 2 2 3 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 14 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

For the first part, image processing is necessary before generating characteristic
codes, as unwanted background may appear in photos taken by users and some
shooting problems may also occur such as blurred image due to focus loss or less
powerful camera, and image skew due to inappropriate shooting angle. In this case,
edge detection will be used to remove background and then process will be
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performed to correct skew and distortion, sharpening image and adjust image
contrast. Next, the processed image will be divided in to blocks. The mean value of all
pixels in each block will be computed and lined up to form the characteristic codes.
Figure 2 is a schematic diagram of the above process, while details vary in practice.
As characteristic codes can be regarded as keywords in a usual search scenario,
we will use some existing technique of search engine for codes comparison. First of
all, instead of seeking a perfect matching result, we will set up a certain level of
threshold for error tolerance, which means the similarities between codes to be
searched and codes in the database are our interests. Secondly, index of
characteristic codes of photos in the database will be compiled to accelerate the
searching process. Further, search results will be ranked according to relevance.
Techniques mentioned above are already mature and applied to numerous
applications, hence are highly feasible. In the actual development process, algorithm
adjustment and training for our particular scenario will ensure recognition accuracy.

4.2.2. Locating Users

To display location and corresponding price information of physical stores close
to our users, locating the users will be the most important technology. As the Global
Positioning System (GPS) is widely adopted by most of the mobile devices, utilizing
the programming interfaces of GPS will surely increase the portability of this
software. Based on the financial consideration, we will use the interfaces library
provided by an open source project named GPSTk.
GPSTk, published in 2007 by R. Benjamin Harris and Richard G. Mach, stands for
GPS toolkit and has been widely adopted by thousands of applications. This open
source project consists of three main libraries: GPSTk Core Library, GPSTk
Applications, and GPSTk Auxiliary Libraries, among which we mainly use the first two.
The GPSTk Core Library provides broadly useful and platform independent interface
codes. It also includes several classical models and algorithms, such as solving for the
user position or estimating atmospheric refraction. The GPSTk Applications covers
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most of the application-oriented interfaces, such as pseudorange-based positioning,

phase-based positioning and basic transformations.
Whenever users trigger the locating function in this software, programming
interfaces in the GPSTk library will be called to fulfill the task of accurate positioning.
According to the U.S. governments 4th edition documentations on GPS performance,
civilian GPS signal will provide a worst case pseudorange accuracy of 7.8 meters at
a 95% confidence level. As GPS is adopted by this software, the locating accuracy of
this software is virtually the same as 10 meters.

4.2.3. Relevant Information Retrieval

This part of functionality depends more on database development and
maintenance rather than algorithm. For two different kinds of information, we use
different data sources and storage strategy described as the following.

4.2.3.1.

Information with Existing Database

Numerous of database for music previews, artists introduction, price of online

digital stores and comments from users and critics have been established and
adopted by existing mobile music applications. Similarly, Musicover will provide these
categories of information by accessing online data sources under authorization and
corresponding terms of use. Artists introduction and previews shall be from the
database of online digital stores, while comments can be from either digital stores or
music critic website such as Rate Your Music. Once authorized to use these database,
we will negotiate to them and establish the corresponding software interface for
receiving data according to their requirements.

4.2.3.2.

Information without Existing Database

As physical store owners determine the price of albums individually, our work
will focus on providing latest price information in physical stores accurately, which to
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be realized by cooperation with physical stores. We will be responsible for data

servers setup, database standard development and the use of data, while physical
store owners shall upload their product price information and update on regular base.
The possibility of cooperation owes to the fact that Musicover provide promotion
chances to physical store owners and makes them more profitable.

4.2.4. Other functions and Integration

In addition to the functions described above, sharing function will be integrated
into Musicover through software interface provided by other applications.
To utilize hardware on mobile devices including touch screen, physical button
and camera, we will access them through the hardware interface provided by
operating systems as most application do.

4.3. User Interface

4.3.1. Principle of Design
When designing the user interface of this software, we stick to several
principles.
Simplicity: only necessary entries will appear in the main interface, while most of

the detailed functions are displayed in the album viewing page. This hierarchical
structure guarantees the clear and concise of Musicover
Consistency: core elements such as background color and MUSICOVER button will

appear repeatedly to maintain consistency throughout the whole application.

Visibility: all icons are designed in a clear manner so that users can easily identify

their corresponding functions. No redundant text will be displayed.

4.3.2. Prototype and Sample

We have already designed a prototype for the user interface. Two sample

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images are as follows.

Figure 3. Main Interface

Enter the Browse Mode

Browse
List

New
Search
Main interface provides entries to different functionalities.
Browse mode entry allows users to choose specific genre or style to start

browsing.
The button Musicover shall ask whether to enter keywords, trigger the camera

to take a photo or select an existing image to initiate a new search.

After user chooses one album to view, Musicover shall enter another interface
and retrieve affiliated information from the database. The following figure is a
sample of iOS version.

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Figure 4. Interface of Viewing Album (iOS)

Preview
Album
Information
Track List
Link to
Digital Store

Main Interface View Physical Comments and

Sharing
Stores and Price

New Search

4.4. Testing
4.4.1. Hardware Requirement
This software is intended for smart mobile devices with cameras, whose
hardware configuration varies greatly. Therefore we will ensure the availability of
Musicover on the following hardware environment so that this software runs
smoothly on most devices.
Operating System
RAM
ROM
Camera Resolution

Android 2.0 or later

iOS 4 or later
10MB
20MB
>300 pixels

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4.4.2. Testing Approach

Based on the minimum hardware requirements, we test this software on
different devices. Instead of purchasing numerous devices, we conduct the testing on
mobile device emulators, which provide real running environments of the devices.
There are three levels of testing:
Unit testing: test only one specified function of this software;
Integration testing: test different units working together. Simulate the case when

users run this software;

System testing: test the entire system as a whole. Details include full-scale tests,

negative tests, overload tests.

The accuracy rate of image recognition shall be no less than 98% to pass the test.
Besides, the anticipated RAM consumption shall be less than 3MB and ROM
consumption shall be less than 5MB while the response time for each users
operation shall be no larger than 100ms.

5. Goals and Impact

As Musicover is proposed to meet the customers needs, it is expected to
improve user experience in physical music store generally. We formulated the
following detailed objectives. Firstly, we hope to reduce the time spent on identifying
an album and searching its related information. Secondly, we expect to bring a more
convenient way for users to preview music. Thirdly, comparing different CD stores is
supposed to be easier than ever before when using Musicover.
If Musicover is with a large number of users, it shall have some positive impacts
on the music industry. Since digitization of music are causing a hard time for CD
manufacturers and retailers, the growth of CD consumption may increase the
attraction of physical stores and hence help avoid the recession of the industry or
even bring a growth.

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6. Costs
The majority of the costs before Musicover release are labor costs, tools costs
and promotion costs. After our application launch, costs will reduce to maintenance
and updating costs only, which is not yet included in this project.

6.1. Labor Costs

The estimated duration for this project is 3 months. There are a programming
team consisting of 4 people and a testing team consisting of 2 people. Testing team is
only required to work for 2 weeks. So the appraised labor cost is 300,000 HKD.

6.2. Development Tools Costs

Database software, compiler software and mobile device emulator are the
development tools that we will use to build Musicover. As most popular emulators
are software based and do not require extra hardware equipment, only license fee
for software is needed. The development tools cost around 1,000 HKD.

6.3. Promotion Costs

The cost of promotion is dominated by the price of advertisements on different
media. Precise cost of promotion can be given after platitudinous market
investigation.

7. Profit Model
Referring to the mature profit model of existing products and based on the
results of our survey, we have chosen two viable ways of utilizing the profitability of

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this product, which are sales revenue and income from embedded advertising.
Our product will be released in two versions, free version with embedded
advertisement and full version with advertisement removed. While free version
lowers the threshold of new users first trial for Musicover, the embedded advertising
strategy guarantees our profit on free version users. On the other hand, people who
want to remove advertisement (69.4% of our respondents to the questionnaire are
of this kind) to have a better using experience can pay for a full version product and
hence contributes to our sales revenue.
To determine the price for full version Musicover, we need a further analysis of
the market and trial sales. Promotional price-cuts may also be used to accelerate the
accumulation of the number of users.

8. Potential Risks and Solutions

There are two potential risks we have concerned which could cause the project
fail.

8.1. Algorithm Failure

Our algorithm may fail, namely the average recognition rate cannot reach the
standard of testing after 3 months, since the quality of the photo taken by users can
vary greatly under the influence of various factors such as camera resolution,
shooting conditions and tags on album cover, we need to adjust our algorithm to
different conditions.
To solve this problem, we will try to apply another algorithm to generate
characteristic codes so as to enable the search engine to identify the most matching
result.

8.2. Information Collection Failure

Insufficient of cooperating physical stores is another potential problem since we
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are unable to provide enough price information for users consideration and
comparison. This will eliminates one feature of our product potentially.
To attract cooperators, we can offer free embedded advertising services to
physical store owners for a period of time and provide detailed guidance of creating
and uploading price database to make their collaborative tasks easier.

9. Project Schedule
We have also proposed a schedule with total duration of three months for
implementing this project. The developments of album cover recognition function,
price database, user interface and other functionalities are independent of each
other and hence can be performed in parallel. Integration and testing will then be
performed mainly in linear. Appendix B gives the whole schedule.

10. Conclusion
Musicover acts as a digital shop assistant when purchasing CD from physical
music stores, supplying a revolutionary way for people to retrieve abundant useful
information about music albums. Technologies of high performance and feasibility
are implemented to ensure the simplicity and efficiency of Musicover, which will
make it distinguished among mobile music applications. Targeting at a great market
of music lovers with smart devices, we also believe that Musicover is of promising
popularity.
The idea of recognizing objects via image is extendable and indicates a general
solution to connecting the digital world with the real world. In the future, smart
devices may provide information to people on whatever they are interested in such
as books, landscapes and even persons. This area is definitely worth exploring,

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Reference
1. ARL The University of Texas at Austin. (n.d.). Retrieved 11 28, 2012, from GPSTK
Documentation: http://www.gpstk.org/bin/view/Documentation/WebHome
2. Krarup, J. ". (n.d.). Simple image comparison in .NET. Retrieved 11 20, 2012, from Code
Project:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/374386/Simple-image-comparison-in-NET
3. R. Sinan Tumen, M. E. (2010). Feature extraction and classifier combination for
image-based sketch recognition. SBIM '10 Proceedings of the Seventh Sketch-Based
Interfaces and Modeling Symposium (pp. 63-70). Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland,
Switzerland: Eurographics Association.
4. Xiaoxin Tang, L. Z. (2012). PMA: Pixel-based multi-anchor algorithm for image
recognition on multi-core systems. PMAM '12 Proceedings of the 2012 International
Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores
(pp. 36 - 44). New York, NY: ACM.

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Appendix AQuestionnaire
Sample Size: 49
On habits
1) Do you fond of music?
a. Strongly agree (20, 40.8%)
b. Agree (17, 34.7%)
c. Kind of (6, 12.2%)
d. Not at all (6, 12.2%)
2) Which device do you usually use to listen to music? (multiple choices)
a. Smart Phones (39)
b. Tablets (13)
c. Computer (47)
d. CD Player/Speakers (15)

On consuming audio and video products

3) Which manner do you prefer to get music?
a. Download from the internet (14, 28.6%)
b. Purchase from digital music store (16, 32.7%)
c. Purchase from physical music store (11, 22.4%)
d. Rent from physical music store (2, 4.1%)
e. Borrow CDs from others (4, 8.2%)
f. Other :________(2, 4.1%)
4) How often do you visit a physical music store?
a. Every week (4, 8.2%)
b. Every month (11, 22.4%)
c. Seldom (29, 59.2%)
d. Never (5, 10.2%)
5) How often do you visit a digital music store?
a. Every week (21, 42.9%)
b. Every month (18, 36.7%)
c. Seldom (5, 10.2%)
d. Never (5, 10.2%)
6) What information do you want to know before buying a CD? (multiply choices)
a. Previews (42)
b. Artists introduction (11)
c. Comments from other listener (17)
d. Recommendation from music critics (22)
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e. Price comparison among both physical and digital stores (31)

f. Others:_________ (7)
7) You usually get these kinds of information by (multiple choices)
a. Searching on the internet (39)
b. Newspapers and Magazines (12)
c. Music store shop assistants (16)
d. Music applications on mobile devices (23)
e. Others:_________(5)
8) Are you satisfied with the current previewing services provided by physical music
store?
a. Strongly yes (4, 8.2%)
b. Yes (7, 14.3%)
c. They are just so-so (17, 34.7%)
d. Not at all (21, 42.9%)
9) Are you satisfied with relevant information of music albums provided by physical
music store?
a. Strongly yes (10, 20.4%)
b. Yes (15, 30.6%)
c. They are just so-so (23, 46.9%)
d. Not at all (1, 2.0%)
On using mobile application
10) Have you ever used the following music application on a mobile device?
(multiple choices)
a. SoundHound (21)
b. Shazam (12)
c. Hunter (23)
d. Planetary (5)
e. Other:________(18)
11) Are you satisfied with the music searching services provided by the application
you specified in the last question?
a. Strongly yes (12, 24.5%)
b. Yes (10, 20.4%)
c. It is just so-so (21, 42.9%)
d. Not at all (6, 12.2%)
12) Will you pay for removing advertisement in a mobile music application and
upgrading to the full version?
a. Yes (34, 69.4%)
b. No (15, 30.6%)
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Appendix BSchedule
Table 2Project Schedule

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