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How Perceptual Hashes Work

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Re: How Perceptual Hashes Work

#21
I've always wondered how services like Shazam work. I'm amazed that they can do this kind of perceptual hash against ANY 10 second portion of a song. How do they search against something like that when they don't know the start or end time of the segment that is being input?

Re: How Perceptual Hashes Work

#22

This reminds me of OpenSSH's fingerprint visualization support ("VisualHostKey yes"): $ ssh A.B.C.D Host key fingerprint is b0:c9:c9:96:fb:fd:ac:a4:ff:70:8f:1b:35:f4:f9:2e +--[ECDSA 256]---+ | | | | | . . | | o * . ..| | O S o..| | . . . ..| | . o o .| | . + + +E. | | o.++*....| +-----------------+ me@A.B.C.D's password: Original article introducing this feature: http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2008061…

This is pretty much the opposite from what the article is talking about -- the article is trying to get a hash from an image in order to compare that image to another, while you're talking about synthesizing an image from an arbitrary hash...

Hence "reminds me" :)

Re: How Perceptual Hashes Work

#25

I've always wondered how services like Shazam work. I'm amazed that they can do this kind of perceptual hash against ANY 10 second portion of a song. How do they search against something like that when they don't know the start or end time of the segment that is being input?

For pop/rock/rap music it probably doesn't matter. For classical, I'm not sure.

Re: How Perceptual Hashes Work

#27

I've always wondered how services like Shazam work. I'm amazed that they can do this kind of perceptual hash against ANY 10 second portion of a song. How do they search against something like that when they don't know the start or end time of the segment that is being input?

Yes the delta part is clever. Shazam is well described here: www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

Re: How Perceptual Hashes Work

#28

I've always wondered how services like Shazam work. I'm amazed that they can do this kind of perceptual hash against ANY 10 second portion of a song. How do they search against something like that when they don't know the start or end time of the segment that is being input?

I do research in music information retrieval. See the ISMIR 2003 paper below. In short, it searches for landmarks in the spectrogram, hashes those landmarks, then compares those hashes against database hashes for temporal continuity. http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

A seminal paper on audio fingerprinting is the one by Haitsma and Kalker. http://ismir2002.ismir.net/proceedings/02-fp04-2.pdf

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