A Robust Audio Fingerprinting System with Predominant Pitch Extraction in Real-Noise Environment

The robustness of audio fingerprinting system in a noisy environment is a principal challenge in the area of content-based audio retrieval. The selected feature for the audio fingerprints must be robust in a noisy environment and the computational complexity of the searching algorithm must be low enough to be executed in real-time. The audio fingerprint proposed by Philips uses expanded hash table lookup to compensate errors introduced by noise. The expanded hash table lookup increases the searching complexity by a factor of 33 times the degree of expansion defined by the hamming distance. We propose a new method to improve noise robustness of audio fingerprinting in noise environment using predominant pitch which reduces the bit error of created hash values. The sub-fingerprint of our approach method is computed in each time frames of audio. The time frame is transformed into the frequency domain using FFT. The obtained audio spectrum is divided into 33 critical bands. Finally, the 32-bit hash value is computed by difference of each bands of energy. And only store bits near predominant pitch. Predominant pitches are extracted in each time frames of audio. The extraction process consists of harmonic enhancement, harmonic summation and selecting a band among critical bands.