A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System

Imagine the following situation. You’re in your car, listening to the radio and suddenly you hear a song that catches your attention. It’s the best new song you have heard for a long time, but you missed the announcement and don’t recognize the artist. Still, you would like to know more about this music. What should you do? You could call the radio station, but that’s too cumbersome. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could push a few buttons on your mobile phone and a few seconds later the phone would respond with the name of the artist and the title of the music you’re listening to? Perhaps even sending an email to your default email address with some supplemental information. In this paper we present an audio fingerprinting system, which makes the above scenario possible. By using the fingerprint of an unknown audio clip as a query on a fingerprint database, which contains the fingerprints of a large library of songs, the audio clip can be identified. At the core of the presented system are a highly robust fingerprint extraction method and a very efficient fingerprint search strategy, which enables searching a large fingerprint database with only limited computing resources.