On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital fingerprinting. Assigned to Google, the first patent addresses techniques for document near-duplicate detection. Assigned to Zeitera, the second patent addresses techniques for media fingerprinting and identification.
8,364,686, "Document near-duplicate detection," assigned to Google.
Abstract
A near-duplicate component includes a fingerprint creation component and a similarity detection component. The fingerprint creation component receives a document of arbitrary size and generates a compact "fingerprint" that describes the contents of the document. The similarity detection component compares multiple fingerprints based on the hamming distance between the fingerprints. When the hamming distance is below a threshold, the documents can be said to be near-duplicates of one another.8,364,703, "Media fingerprinting and identification system," assigned to Zeitera, LLC.
Abstract
The overall architecture and details of a scalable video fingerprinting and identification system that is robust with respect to many classes of video distortions is described. In this system, a fingerprint for a piece of multimedia content is composed of a number of compact signatures, along with traversal hash signatures and associated metadata. Numerical descriptors are generated for features found in a multimedia clip, signatures are generated from these descriptors, and a reference signature database is constructed from these signatures. Query signatures are also generated for a query multimedia clip. These query signatures are searched against the reference database using a fast similarity search procedure, to produce a candidate list of matching signatures. This candidate list is further analyzed to find the most likely reference matches. Signature correlation is performed between the likely reference matches and the query clip to improve detection accuracy.
