Hardware architecture for an audio fingerprinting system

Abstract

Collusion-resistant fingerprinting seems to be an effective solution to piracy because it allows media owners to detect any unauthorized copies and trace them back to dishonest users. When fingerprinting techniques are used by a digital media store, where massive distribution of audio and video is common, real-time multi-channel performance is essential. Digital signal processors and multi-core workstations have been used to implement watermarking schemes and they can provide audio signal processing in real-time. In addition, custom hardware architectures offer the possibility of fully exploiting the parallelism inherent in this type of algorithm for more demanding scenarios.We present an efficient hardware implementation of a spread spectrum algorithm-based collusion-resistant fingerprinting system in the modulated complex lapped transform domain. The results of implementing the proposed hardware architecture on a field programmable gate array are presented and discussed.