Abstract: To identify a media item from a database of media items that have common content, a region of interest is defined to include a plurality of frames of a test fingerprint that correspond to different segments of a media item. A media identification system queries a database of reference fingerprints to identify candidate reference fingerprints that contain a frame that matches a frame of the test fingerprint. When a candidate reference fingerprint is found, additional matching frames are determined and the region of interest is reduced to eliminate the matched frames of the test fingerprint. This continues until the region of interest is empty or there are no further matching candidates. Once the set of candidate reference fingerprints are identified, the media identification system compares the test fingerprint to the candidates to determine a closest match, thereby identifying the media item associated with the test fingerprint.

Abstract: A characteristic thumbprint is extracted from a data signal, the thumbprint based on statistics relating to the data signal. The data signal can be compared indirectly by matching this thumbprint against one or more reference thumbprints. The data signal may be any type of signal, including streaming digitized audio or obtained from static files. A database may contain a number of these characteristic thumbprints, and the database can be searched for a particular thumbprint.

Abstract: A media identification system generates reference fingerprints for known media samples and stores the reference fingerprints in a reference database. The media identification system uses the reference fingerprints to match a fingerprint generated from an unknown media sample to identify that unknown sample. When storing new reference fingerprints in the reference database, partitions of the database are selected to balance the search loads on the database when it is used by the media identification system. For example, the selected partitions may be determined based at least in part on the access rates of the partitions by the media identification system. New reference fingerprints will tend to be placed in partitions that have relatively lower access rates that the other partitions, which will tend to balance the search loads on the partitions by the media identification system.

Abstract: A characteristic thumbprint is extracted from a data signal, the thumbprint based on statistics relating to the data signal. The data signal can be compared indirectly by matching this thumbprint against one or more reference thumbprints. The data signal may be any type of signal, including streaming digitized audio or obtained from static files. A database may contain a number of these characteristic thumbprints, and the database can be searched for a particular thumbprint.

Abstract: A video fingerprinting algorithm extracts characteristic features from regions of interest in a media object, such as a video signal. The regions of interest contain the perceptually important parts of the video signal. A fingerprint may be extracted from a target media object, and the fingerprint the target media content may then be matched against multiple regions of interest of known reference fingerprints. This matching may allow identification of complex scenes, inserts, and different versions of the same content presented in, for example, different formats of the media object.

Abstract: An audio fingerprint is extracted from an audio sample, where the fingerprint contains information that is characteristic of the content in the sample. The fingerprint may be generated by computing an energy spectrum for the audio sample, resampling the energy spectrum logarithmically in the time dimension, transforming the resampled energy spectrum to produce a series of feature vectors, and computing the fingerprint using differential coding of the feature vectors. The generated fingerprint can be compared to a set of reference fingerprints in a database to identify the original audio content.

Abstract: A characteristic thumbprint is extracted from a data signal, the thumbprint based on statistics relating to the data signal. The data signal can be compared indirectly by matching this thumbprint against one or more reference thumbprints. The data signal may be any type of signal, including streaming digitized audio or obtained from static files. A database for containing a number of such thumbprints and methods for searching the database are also described.