Patent ID: 8768495

Claim:
An apparatus for providing automatic recognition of source media content from a source signal by comparison to reference media content, the apparatus including: one or more computer systems configured to implement: a spectrogram generator operable to generate a spectrogram from the source signal by applying a Fourier transform to the source signal, the spectrogram including a plurality of columns, each column being representative of a time slice and including a plurality of frequency bins each representative of a respective range of frequency components for the time slice of the source signal; a vector generator operable to generate a plurality of source vectors including at least one source vector for each of respective time slices of the source signal, said at least one source vector for a said time slice of the source signal being generated by calculating ratios of magnitudes of selected frequency bins from the column for said time slice and quantizing the ratios to generate digits of said source vector, wherein a plurality of reference vectors represent the reference media content including at least one reference vector for each of respective time slices of the reference media content; a primary evaluator operable to perform a primary evaluation by performing an exact match of digits of first vectors to entries in a look-up table, wherein each entry in the look-up table is associated with a group of second vectors, wherein the number of digits of the first vectors used to perform the exact match differs between entries in the look-up table, and wherein the first vectors are one of the source vectors and the reference vectors, and the second vectors are the other of the source vectors and the reference vectors; a secondary evaluator operable to perform a secondary evaluation to determine a degree of similarity between the first vectors and each of the group of second vectors to identify any second vectors that are candidates for matching the source media content to the reference media content; and a database comprising the look-up table and the second vectors.