How to detect similar videos

What you are looking for is Digital Video Fingerprinting.

Video fingerprinting is a technique in which software identifies, extracts and then compresses characteristic components of a video, enabling that video to be uniquely identified by its resultant “fingerprint”. Video fingerprinting is technology that has proven itself to be effective at identifying and comparing digital video data.

Here are some relevant companies that support this:

  • Advestigo (audio, video and image fingerprinting)
  • Attributor (image and video fingerprinting)
  • Audible Magic (audio & video image fingerprinting)
  • Auditude Connect technology (audio and video fingerprinting)
  • Flingo (audio and video fingerprinting for Smart TV)
  • INA (video fingerprinting)
  • iPharro Media (adaptive video fingerprinting)
  • Miranda (audio, video and image fingerprinting)
  • Civolution (audio and video fingerprinting)
  • Vercury (audio, image and video fingerprinting)
  • Vidyatel Video conform, TV tracking and Management (frame accurate video fingerprinting)
  • Vobile Content Identification and Management (audio and video fingerprinting)
  • Yuvad Technologies - content-aware video advertising solution
  • YUVsoft (video fingerprinting and search)
  • Zeitera (video fingerprinting)
  • Lumilogic (video fingerprinting and search)

All of these (which are listed on Wikipedia) seem professional paid solutions, some of them do no longer seem to exist. You might be able to find something by searching through project hosting websites...

Most of them decide to keep their algorithms private and rather provide a service than selling a product.


I too have been looking for a program like this. The closest that I have found is Thumbsplus (Cerious.com). It can make thumbnails of most video types. It can then find duplicate or even similar thumbnails of these videos. It is really made for still photos, but it does work for this too.

It helped me.