Comparison of Data Signals Using Characteristic Electronic Thumbprints Extracted Therefrom

• US 20090034807A1
• Filed: 07/31/2008
• Published: 02/05/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 04/24/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: ID3MAN, Inc.
• Inventors: Caruso, Jeffrey L., Yeager, William S., Seet, Nicholas
• Granted Patent: US 7,853,438 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/124
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/634 Query by example, e.g. query by humming
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/683 using metadata automatically derived from the content
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2210/031 Musical analysis, i.e. isolation, extraction or identification of musical elements or musical parameters from a raw acoustic signal or from an encoded audio signal neural networks for electrophonic musical instruments or musical processing G10H2250/311
• CPC Class Codes: G10H 2240/141 Library retrieval matching, i.e. any of the steps of matching an inputted segment or phrase with musical database contents, e.g. query by humming, singing or playing; the steps may include, e.g. musical analysis of the input, musical feature extraction, query formulation, or details of the retrieval process

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.

Claims

1. A method for extracting a digital thumbprint based on at least a portion of a data signal, the method comprising:

filtering the data signal into a plurality of different frequency bands to create a plurality of filtered signals;

determining a measure of power contained in each of two or more of the filtered signals;

creating a digital thumbprint as a function of the measures of power for the filtered signals; and

storing the digital thumbprint in a storage medium.