A new content-based digital audio watermarking algorithm for copyright protection

Abstract

Digital audio watermarking embeds inaudible information into digital audio data for the purposes of copyright protection, ownership verification, convert communication, and/or auxiliary data carrying. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme to embed a meaningful gray image into digital audio by quantizing the wavelet coefficients (using integer lifting wavelet transform) of audio samples. Our audio-dependent watermarking procedure directly exploits temporal and frequency perceptual masking of the human auditory system (HAS) to guarantee that the embedded watermark image is inaudible and robust. The watermark is constructed by utilizing still image compression technique, breaking each audio clip into smaller segments, selecting the perceptually significant audio segments to wavelet transform, and quantizing the perceptually significant wavelet coefficients. The proposed watermarking algorithm can extract the watermark image without the help from the original digital audio signals. We also demonstrate the robustness of that watermarking procedure to audio degradations and distortions, e.g., those that result from noise adding, MPEG compression, low pass filtering, resampling, and requantization.