I'm guessing it's a similar problem to matching up degraded audio to song title. If you haven't tried this, the Shazam app on the iPhone does this with surpris

I'm guessing it's a similar problem to matching up degraded audio to song title. If you haven't tried this, the Shazam app on the iPhone does this with surprising reliability (at least from my car speakers). I recall seeing a paper on how Shazam does their magic (ha!). Something to do with "fingerprinting" the audio in such a way that is resilient to background noise (that also can be indexed and searched very quickly). I imagine that a similar strategy to identify video would also work.