The overall architecture and details of a scalable video fingerprinting and identification system that is robust with respect to many classes of video distortions is described. In this system, a fingerprint for a piece of multimedia content is composed of a number of compact signatures, along with traversal hash signatures and associated metadata. Numerical descriptors are generated for features found in a multimedia clip, signatures are generated from these descriptors, and a reference signature database is constructed from these signatures. Query signatures are also generated for a query multimedia clip. These query signatures are searched against the reference database using a fast similarity search procedure, to produce a candidate list of matching signatures. This candidate list is further analyzed to find the most likely reference matches. Signature correlation is performed between the likely reference matches and the query clip to improve detection accuracy.