Today there are unprecedented opportunities for bringing new digital content to consumers. To capitalize on these opportunities, a vital element is a fast, accurate, scalable content identification technology to determine ownership, prevent unauthorized distribution, and track usage. The Vobile Content Identification Platform provides this key element and helps stakeholders realize the enormous potential of online video distribution.

The core of this platform is the patented VDNA^® “fingerprinting” technology. VDNA is a compact and unique signature, or “fingerprint”, that can be computed for any audiovisual content without altering the source content. To identify an unknown piece of audiovisual content, its VDNA is extracted and compared against the reference fingerprint database, known as the Vobile DNA Database (VDDB^®). If a match is found, the querying application is provided with comprehensive metadata on the match.

The Vobile Content Identification Platform supports wide-ranging applications, including online rights management, content-aware advertising, business intelligence, metadata services, media asset management, automatic content recognition, and audiovisual search. In addition to developing its own applications, Vobile will work with partners to make third-party applications available on the platform.

In a nutshell, VDNA is a unique identifier that can be used to identify audiovisual content. Like human DNA, VDNA is a robust identifier—its pattern stays largely invariant for the same audiovisual content, independent of video resolution, aspect ratio, encoding bit rate, frame rate, or file format. On the other hand, VDNA is also a highly discriminative identifier that is distinctively different for different content able to differentiate between closely related content.

The Vobile Content Identification Platform is a client-server architecture consisting of several key components, including the VDNA Client and Server, and the Vobile DNA Database (VDDB^®).

The Vobile Client component can be implemented in software or hardware, across platforms such as PC, mobile (phone/tablet), and smart CE devices (smartTV). The Client’s function is to extract the unique fingerprint data from audiovisual content, then communicate with the Server for a query and match. The Server answers queries and returns match results to the Client. It is supported in its backend by a database that contains an index of fingerprints and associated metadata.

• Non-intrusive - does not alter content. Can be used for new and catalog content.
• Flexible - supports both file-based and live-streaming workflow, as well as both native and compressed file formats.
• Fast - fingerprint generation and content query speed is hundreds to thousands times faster than real time.
• Comprehensive - technology encompasses video, audio, and image fingerprints, which can be used independently or combined for content ID.
• Robust - unaffected by video compression artifacts, client-side filtering effects, and all common video transformations and distortions, such as codec, wrapper, aspect ratio, color, contrast, brightness, cropping, blurring, sampling rate, noise, scaling, rotation, and flipping.
• Reliable - VDNA is distinctly different for each unique video file, resulting in a near-zero “false-positive” rate.
• Accurate - precision content matching with frame level accuracy.
• Discriminatory - can distinguish between similar content (mashups, dubs, cam versions, etc.).
• Compact - low data rate for easy storage / offline applications.
• Scalable - proven to maintain accuracy and speed in very large-scale commercial deployments.
• Efficient - multi-resolution, multi-rate representation enables rapid identification against a very large reference database.
• Competitive - independently verified, commercially deployed, and market proven.