Robust and lightweight audio fingerprint for Automatic Content Recognition

Abstract: This research paper presents a novel audio fingerprinting system for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). By using signal processing techniques and statistical transformations, our proposed method generates compact fingerprints of audio segments that are robust to noise degradations present in real-world audio. The system is designed to be highly scalable, with the ability to identify thousands of hours of content using fingerprints generated from millions of TVs. The fingerprint's high temporal correlation and utilization of existing GPU-compatible Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) search algorithms make this possible. Furthermore, the fingerprint generation can run on low-power devices with limited compute, making it accessible to a wide range of applications. Experimental results show improvements in our proposed system compared to a min-hash based audio fingerprint on all evaluated metrics, including accuracy on proprietary ACR datasets, retrieval speed, memory usage, and robustness to various noises. For similar retrieval accuracy, our system is 30x faster and uses 6x fewer fingerprints than the min-hash method.