Patent ID: 7783489

Claim:
Apparatus for recognizing audio signals, comprising: a hand-held device having a microphone to capture audio signals; a processor to transmit audio signal features, corresponding to the captured audio signals, to a recognition processor; one of said hand-held device and said processor including circuitry which extracts a time series of spectrally distinct audio signal features from the captured audio signals; and the recognition processor and a recognition memory, said recognition memory storing data corresponding to a plurality of audio templates, each audio template having audio signal features, said recognition processor comparing the audio signal features transmitted from said processor with at least one of the audio templates stored in said recognition processor memory in a rank order corresponding to the spectral distinctiveness of the audio signal features of the stored audio templates, said recognition processor providing a recognition signal based on a degree of similarity between the rank-ordered, stored audio signal features and the audio signal features transmitted from said processor.