A robust content based audio watermarking using UDWT and invariant histogram

Abstract

Desynchronization attack is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist, for it can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. It is a challenging work to design a robust audio watermarking scheme against desynchronization attacks. Based on undecimated discrete wavelet transform (UDWT) and invariant histogram, we propose a new content based audio watermarking algorithm with good audible quality and reasonable resistance toward desynchronization attacks in this paper. Firstly, the undecimated discrete wavelet transform (UDWT) is performed on original host audio. Secondly, the invariant histogram is extracted from a selected wavelet coefficients range in the low frequency subband. Then, the bin of histogram is divided into many groups, each group including four consecutive bins. For each group, one watermark bit is embedded by reassigning the number of wavelet coefficients in this group of four bins. Finally, the digital watermark is embedded into the original audio signal in UDWT domain by modifying a small set of wavelet coefficients. Simulation results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is not only inaudible and robust against common signal processing operations such as MP3 compression, noise addition, and low-pass filtering etc, but also robust against the desynchronization attacks such as random cropping, time-scale modification, pitch shifting, and jittering etc.