Optimal configuration of hash table based multimedia fingerprint databases using weak bits

The increasingly large amount of digital multimedia content has created a need for technologies to search and identify multimedia files. Multimedia fingerprinting has been widely researched and successfully commercialized as a technology to trace and recognize both audio and video content. Most published research on multimedia fingerprinting focuses on the design of the fingerprinting extraction algorithm. The architecture of the fingerprinting database and the database query search algorithm has only been investigated in very few publications. In particular, no comprehensive mathematical models describing the accuracy of database query algorithms have been developed. Therefore, most performance evaluations of fingerprint system rely on experimental data. In this paper, we develop an analytic model to describe the operation of hash-table based multimedia fingerprinting databases. It allows to predict the accuracy of a fingerprinting query algorithm as a function of the statistical distribution of the fingerprints and the specific design of the fingerprint database.