US Patent 9723344 Early detection of policy violating media

A media sharing system identifies fingerprints that represent an uploaded video and generates a digest based on the fingerprints. The media sharing system searches for digests of previously processed videos whose digests match the digest of the uploaded video. A previously processed video whose digest matches the digest of the uploaded video is identified as a matching video. For each matching video, the media sharing system retrieves policy information that describes whether the video was found to violate one or more policies of the media sharing system. The media sharing system determines whether to halt processing of the uploaded video based on the retrieved policy information.