Audio Watermarking

Techniques
Single Member - Arun Kancharla (CVN)
E6886 Spring 2005
 What is watermarking?
• Audio watermarks are special signals embedded into
digital audio
• They can be extracted by detection mechanisms and
decoded
• They are used to track, authenticate and prevent illegal
distribution and manipulation of copyright digital audio
• Audio watermarking schemes rely on imperfections of
the human auditory system
• However, human ear is a very sensitive and good audio
watermarking schemes are difficult to design
 Desired Features of Algorithms
• Signal Processing properties
– It should be unperceivable by an observer which means that the
carrier should not be altered in a perceptible way
– It should be robust against intentional or anticipated
manipulations e.g. compression, filtering, resampling etc.
• Security Properties
– The watermarking procedure should rely on a key to ensure
security, not on algorithms secrecy
– The algorithm should be published and therefore be available for
public review
– It should have a mathematical formulation to permit validation
– Robustness against collusion attacks
 Desired Features of Algorithms
• General Properties
– The algorithm should allow real-time processing
– The algorithm must be adjustable to different degrees of
robustness, quality and different amount of data
– It should be tunable to different media types
– It should support multiple watermarks
 Goals of the Project
• Implement 3 popular audio watermarking schemes in MATLAB
– Spread-Spectrum Method in Cepstrum domain: a correlation method
which embeds pseudo-random sequence into the cepstral components
and detects watermark by calculating correlation between pseudo-
random noise sequence and the watermarked audio signal
– Watermarking in the Time Domain: an audio masking method (in
Time & Frequency) that slightly modifies the amplitude of each audio
sample.
– Time-Spread Echo method: spreads an imperceptible echo using PN
sequences in the time domain. Decoding uses the same secret PN
sequence key.
• Evaluate merits and demerits of each scheme
• Measure the trade-off between robustness to attack (additive noise,
MP3 compression), watermark strength and perceptible quality
using informal tests on volunteers’ ability to detect the existence of a
watermark
 References
• S-K Lee and Y-S Ho, “Digital Audio Watermarking in the
Cepstrum domain”, IEEE Transactions on Consumer
Electronics, Vol. 46, No. 3, August 2000
• P. Bassia, I. Pitas, N Nikolaidis, “Robust Audio
Watermarking in the time Domain”, IEEE Transactions
on Multimedia, Vol. 3, No. 2, June 2001
• B-S Ko, R. Nishimura, Y. Suzuki, “Time-Spread Echo
Method for Digital Audio Watermarking”, IEEE
Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 7, No. 2, April 2005