Video fingerprinting: Past, present, and future

The last decades have seen video production and consumption rise significantly: TV/cinematography, social networking, digital marketing, and video surveillance incrementally and cumulatively turned video content into the predilection type of data to be exchanged, stored, and processed. Belonging to video processing realm, video fingerprinting (also referred to as content-based copy detection or near duplicate detection) regroups research efforts devoted to identifying duplicated and/or replicated versions of a given video sequence (query) in a reference video dataset. The present paper reports on a state-of-the-art study on the past and present of video fingerprinting, while attempting to identify trends for its development. First, the conceptual basis and evaluation frameworks are set. This way, the methodological approaches (situated at the cross-roads of image processing, machine learning, and neural networks) can be structured and discussed. Finally, fingerprinting is confronted to the challenges raised by the emerging video applications (e.g., unmanned vehicles or fake news) and to the constraints they set in terms of content traceability and computational complexity. The relationship with other technologies for content tracking (e.g., DLT - Distributed Ledger Technologies) are also presented and discussed.