The USC Media Communications Laboratory, led by Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo and two PhD students – Harshad Kadu and Jian Li, and the AdShare engineering team have co-developed a new technology, called fast audio matching (FAM), to detect clean and/or degraded audio that has the master sound recording mixed with dialogue and sound effects such as in a movie, TV show or commercial.

This technology extracts inherent audio fingerprints from an audio clip that are robust to manipulations/degradations. The FAM system can detect songs of partial durations, say, less than 15 seconds and provide a confidence level on a scale from 1 to N, where N being a perfect match. It can be run on a personal computer running Linux, MySQL, Apache, and PHP now, and will be implemented in mobile devices with a cloud environment in the near future.

The joint R&D team has continuously worked on system performance optimization to meet real-time processing requirements. The team also keeps developing a more advanced technique that handles sounds distorted by other methods such as pitch shifts, white noise, and instrument swaps.