Fast Audio Fingerprinting System Using GPU and a Clustering-Based Technique

In this paper, we present our audio fingerprinting system that detects a transformed copy of an audio from a large collection of audios in a database. The audio fingerprints in this system encode the positions of salient regions of binary images derived from a spectrogram matrix. The similarity between two fingerprints is defined as the intersection of their elements (i.e. positions of the salient regions). The search algorithm labels each reference fingerprint in the database with the closest query frame and then counts the number of matching frames when the query is overlaid over the reference. The best match is based on this count. The salient regions fingerprints together with this nearest-neighbor search give excellent copy detection results. However, for a large database, this search is time consuming. To reduce the search time, we accelerate this similarity search by using a graphics processing unit (GPU). To speed this search even further, we use a two-step search based on a clustering technique and a lookup table that reduces the number of comparisons between the query and the reference fingerprints. We also explore the tradeoff between the speed of search and the copy detection performance. The resulting system achieves excellent results on TRECVID 2009 and 2010 datasets and outperforms several state-of-the-art audio copy detection systems in detection performance, localization accuracy and run time. For a fast detection scenario with detection speed comparable to the Ellis' Shazam-based system, our system achieved the same min NDCR as the NN-based system, and significantly better detection accuracy than Ellis' Shazam-based system.