AUDIO CLASSIFICATION BY COMPARISON OF FEATURE SECTIONS AND INTEGRATED FEATURES TO KNOWN REFERENCES

To classify moving images using audio signals. An audio signal is acquired, a section feature relating to an audio frequency distribution is extracted with respect to each of a plurality of sections each having a predetermined length contained in the acquired audio signal, each extracted section feature is compared with each of reference section features to calculate a section similarity indicating a degree of correlation between each section feature and each reference section feature. An integrated feature relating to the plurality of sections and being calculated based on the section similarity calculated with respect to each of the plurality of sections is extracted from the acquired audio signal. The extracted integrated feature is compared with each of one or more reference integrated features, and the audio signal is classified based on comparison result. Then, classification result is used for moving image classification.