Patent ID: 8363938

Claim:
A method of aligning a first signal comprising a sequence of frames with a second signal comprising a sequence of frames, the method comprising the steps of: determining a similarity measure between each of a plurality of frames of the first signal and each of a plurality of frames of the second signal; assigning a matching value to each frame of said plurality of frames of the first signal wherein the matching value indicates a relative position of a matching frame in the second signal, by repeating the sub-steps of: selecting a subset of frames of the first signal and generating a relative delay histogram, the histogram comprising a set of values corresponding to each of a set of relative delays by: for each frame of said subset identifying the frame of the second signal having the greatest similarity with said frame; determining the relative delay between the identified frame of the second signal and said frame of the first signal; and incrementing the value of the histogram corresponding to said relative delay; identifying one or more peaks in the relative delay histogram; assigning a confidence value to each identified peak; assigning a matching value and an associated confidence value to each frame contributing to a peak in dependence upon said identified peaks and the confidence values of each identified peak.