Audio Fingerprinting: Concepts And Applications

Abstract

An audio fingerprint is a unique and compact digest derived from perceptually relevant aspects of a recording. Fingerprinting technologies allow the monitoring of audio content without the need of metadata or watermark embedding. However, additional uses exist for audio fingerprinting. This paper aims to give a vision on Audio Fingerprinting. The rationale is presented along with the differences with respect to watermarking. The main requirements of fingerprinting systems are described. The basic modes of employing audio fingerprints, namely identification, authentication, content-based secret key generation for watermarking and content-based audio retrieval and processing are depicted. Some concrete scenarios and business models where the technology is used are presented, as well as an example of an audio fingerprinting extraction algorithm which has been proposed for both identification and verification.