SUMMARYThis paper investigates suitable indexing techniques to enable efficient content-based audio retrieval in large acoustic databases. To make an index-based retrieval mechanism applicable to audio content, we investigate the design of Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and the partial sequence comparison. We propose a fast and efficient audio retrieval framework of query-by-content and develop an audio retrieval system. Based on this framework, four different audio retrieval schemes, LSH-Dynamic Programming (DP), LSH-Sparse DP (SDP), Exact Euclidian LSH (E2LSH)-DP, E2LSH-SDP, are introduced and evaluated in order to better understand the performance of audio retrieval algorithms. The experimental results indicate that compared with the traditional DP and the other three compititive schemes, E2LSH-SDP exhibits the best tradeoff in terms of the response time, retrieval accuracy and computation cost. key words: indexing, locality-sensitive hashing, content-based audio retrieval, dynamic programming 1. Introduction Content-based audio retrieval is not only a very promising research topic but also one of the main problems, in multimedia information processing. Handling audio sequence data is usually time-consuming due to the high dimensionality of the features, which makes it inconvenient to utilize the potential content-based information retrieval techniques on the Internet or personal media devices. To access a huge mass of audio information efficiently, it is necessary to explore the audio information, facilitate the management of audio data and serve multimedia applications. Consequently various indexing structures have been reported in the study of audio retrieval. These include, for example, hierarchical structure As far as the creation of query-by-content audio retrieval mechanism via indexing techniques is concerned the main challenges are as follows: (1)