1. A method for robust fingerprinting of an audio signal in a processor, the method comprising: applying a constant Q-factor transform (CQT) to an audio frame selected from a sequence of overlapping audio frames to generate a two dimensional (2D) CQT data structure of CQT coefficients; establishing descriptor generation boxes each with a spatial extent of P×Q in regular intervals across a selected number of octaves of the 2D CQT data structure, wherein P is an extent in a first dimension and Q is an extent in a second dimension; applying a discrete cosine transform (DCT) to each of the descriptor generation boxes to produce transformed coefficient boxes comprising transformed DCT coefficients; and generating descriptors for each of the transformed coefficient boxes to represent the selected audio frame, wherein each descriptor has a length based on a selected number of the transformed DCT coefficients.