A hybrid approach for optimizing transparency, robustness and capacity of an audio watermarking algorithm

Abstract

In the field of digital audio watermarking, the issue of optimizing imperceptibility, robustness and payload is still a big challenge. In this paper, the problem of optimizing the design parameters has been addressed by presenting a secure, robust and imperceptible blind audio watermarking algorithm with large payload. The proposed algorithm is designed using the singular values of SVD in detailed coefficients of wavelet domain. Reference to the existing literature, embedding watermark in the singular values of SVD gives a robust algorithm and embedding in wavelet coefficients provide good transparency. The embedding quantization function is designed in such a way that it introduces minimal changes in the signal while embedding and provide opportunity to hide more watermarking data. The features of both the domains have been properly utilized to achieve robustness and imperceptibility at an acceptable level. The experimental results validate that proposed hybrid technique is robust to various signal processing attacks with good perceptual transparency at high payload. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm has been proved by simulation results. The comparison of the proposed algorithm with the existing algorithms show that proposed algorithm has good performance giving good imperceptibility and robustness at 1562.5 bps.