Everybody smells an opportunity in video copyright detection, and Autonomy is the latest company to tout its solution. The company’s Virage unit today announced its contender, which uses image and audio analysis without relying on watermarking.

The product, fraught with unfortunate acronyms — ACID for Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection and IDOL for Intelligent Data Operating Layer — is offered as a cost-effective alternative for both content owners and online video hosts to proactively scan and quarantine copyrighted content. Lofty and unproven claims, yes, but Autonomy and Virage do have a track record of providing rich media indexing tools.

Video search firm blinkx has some of its corporate and technological heritage at Autonomy but has publicly denied assumptions that the company is a shareholder in the startup.

We’ve covered many other video fingerprinting contenders — Audible Magic, which has signed MySpace and possibly YouTube, iPharro, MotionDSP, and Philips.