Audio fingerprinting based on normalized spectral subband centroids

For multimedia fingerprinting, it is crucial to extract relevant features that allow direct access to the distinguishing characteristics of a multimedia object. Features used for fingerprinting directly relate to the performance of the entire fingerprinting system. The paper proposes a novel audio fingerprinting method based on normalized spectral subband centroids. The spectral subband centroid is selected due to its resilience against equalization, compression, and noise addition. Both reliability and robustness issues in the fingerprinting system are addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is not only reliable, but also robust against various audio processing steps, including MP3 compression, equalization, random start, time-scale modification, and linear speed change.