Speed-change resistant audio fingerprinting using auto-correlation

At ISMIR 2002 and CBMI 2001, the authors presented a new approach to audio fingerprinting (Haitsma, J. and Kalker, T., Proc. Int. Conf. on Music Information Retrieval, p.107-15, 2002; Haitsma et al., Proc. Int. Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing, p.117-25, 2001). The proposed scheme, which we refer to as the streaming audio fingerprinting (SAF) system, allows a very efficient database lookup and is also very robust against many different audio processing steps, including low bit rate audio coding, noise addition and amplitude compression. However it is not inherently robust against large linear speed changes (i.e. speed changes larger than 2%) where both the pitch and the tempo change. This is a potential problem, because some radio stations speed up by a few percent. We discuss a modification of the originally proposed fingerprinting algorithm to make it robust against large linear speed changes. The proposed modification has negligible effect on other aspects, such as robustness and reliability.