Robust and efficient digital audio watermarking using audio content analysis

Digital audio watermarking embeds inaudible information into digital audio data for the purposes of copyright protection, ownership verification, covert communication, and/or auxiliary data carrying. In this paper, we first describe the desirable characteristics of digital audio watermarks. Previous work on audio watermarking, which has primarily focused on the inaudibility of the embedded watermark and its robustness against attacks such as compression and noise, is then reviewed. In this research, special attention is paid to the synchronization attack caused by casual audio editing or malicious random cropping, which is a low-cost yet effective attack to watermarking algorithms developed before. A digital audio watermarking scheme of low complexity is proposed in this research as an effective way to deter users from misusing or illegally distributing audio data. The proposed scheme is based on audio content analysis using the wavelet filterbank while the watermark is embed in the Fourier transform domain. A blind watermark detection technique is developed to identify the embedded watermark under various types of attacks.