This invention generally relates to identifying audio, and more specifically to using a combination of audio fingerprints captured by multiple users attending an event to identify an audio signal from the event.
Real-time identification of audio signals is increasingly used in various applications. For example, many systems use various audio signal identification methods for identifying the name, artist, and/or album of an unknown song. Many audio signal methods generate “test” audio fingerprint for an audio signal, where the test audio fingerprint includes characteristic information about the audio signal usable for identifying the audio signal. The characteristic information about the audio signal may be based on acoustical and perceptual properties of the audio signal. To identify the audio signal, the test audio fingerprint generated from the audio signal is compared to a database including reference audio fingerprints associated with identifying information.
However, conventional audio identification schemes are ill-suited for generating a reference audio fingerprint for identifying certain types of continuous audio signal. For example, conventional audio identification schemes are unable to accurately identify an audio signal for an event based on audio fingerprints because of their inability to generate a reference audio fingerprint that represents the complete audio signal associated with the event. Conventional audio identification techniques are unable to generate a reference fingerprint for an audio signal by combining various test audio fingerprints associated with the audio signal. In particular, conventional techniques for audio signal identification are unable to incorporate on the fly the test fingerprints into database of reference fingerprints while dynamically updating the database to expedite access to newly added test fingerprints.