Patent ID: 8145656

Claim:
A method for matching media objects, comprising: receiving a plurality of reference objects, each reference object comprising a respective first sequence of reference image frames; computing respective reference feature vectors of one or more of the reference image frames in each of the reference objects; receiving a query object, comprising a second sequence of query image frames; computing a respective query feature vector of at least one of the query image frames; searching the reference feature vectors to find one or more candidate objects among the reference objects, using a coarse matching criterion to match a respective reference feature vector of one of the reference image frames in each of the one or more candidate objects to the query feature vector; comparing at least one additional reference image frame, which follows the one of the reference image frames in each of the one or more candidate objects, to at least one additional query image frame, which follows the at least one of the query image frames in the query object, using a fine matching criterion, different from the coarse matching criterion, in order to determine that one of the candidate objects is a match for the query object; and outputting a record of the match, wherein computing the respective reference feature vectors and query feature vector comprises computing multiple feature vectors of at least one frame from among the reference image frames and the query image frames, the multiple feature vectors corresponding to different base characteristics of the query image frames relative to the reference image frames, wherein the base characteristics are selected from a group of image characteristics consisting of an aspect ratio, image borders, scaling, and shift, and wherein searching the reference feature vectors comprises identifying, responsively to the base characteristics, a conversion to be applied to one or more of the query and candidate objects in order to satisfy the coarse matching criterion.