New pending patent applications are published on Thursdays by the USPTO. Today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of digital fingerprinting. Assigned to Facebook, the first application addresses techniques for managing silence in audio signal identification. Assigned to Enswers (KR), the second application addresses techniques that at least in part use digital fingerprinting for surveying broadcasting ratings.
20170229133, "Managing silence in audio signal identification," assigned to Facebook.
Abstract
An audio identification system determines whether a portion of a sample of an audio signal includes silence and generates a test audio fingerprint for the audio signal based on the presence of silence. In one embodiment, the audio identification system uses a value indicating silence for a portion of the test audio fingerprint corresponding to the portion of the audio signal that includes silence. When comparing the test audio fingerprint to reference audio fingerprints, the portion of the test audio fingerprint including the value indicating the presence of silence is not used. In another embodiment, the audio identification system replaces the portion including silence with additive audio and generates a test audio fingerprint for comparison based on the resulting modified sample.
20170230697, "System and method for surveying broadcasting ratings," assigned to Enswers (KR).
Abstract
A system and method in which a TV signal reception device (e.g., set top box) receives a broadcast signal, sends the broadcast signal to a TV, and sends an event signal to a rating statistics information server or associated user terminal when a predetermined condition occurs, to ultimately cause an associated user terminal to generate fingerprint data of audio from the TV and to provide the fingerprint data to the server so as to facilitate channel identification and generation of ratings statistics.
