A QIM-Based Energy Modulation Scheme for Audio Watermarking Robust to Synchronization Attack

Abstract

In this paper, a synchronization attack resilient DCT–SVD–QIM-based blind audio watermarking technique is proposed. The synchronization code and watermark bits are embedded in the discrete cosine transform coefficients by computing singular-value decomposition of selected frames. The quantization index modulation scheme is used to embed the synchronization code and watermark bits in high energy low frequency frames of cover audio signal. The proposed watermarking technique is blind, as the original audio signal is not required for extraction of watermark. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is imperceptible and robust to common signal-processing attacks such as re-sampling, re-quantization, MP3 compression, additive white Gaussian noise and random cropping. The proposed DCT–SVD–QIM-based watermarking technique maintains the imperceptibility and allows higher payload of 4.7 kbps compared to other recently developed DWT-based techniques.