Audio Watermarking by Coefficient Quantization in the DWT-DCT Dual Domain

Abstract

Unauthorized copying and distribution of digital audio has been greatly facilitated by the wide availability of low-cost personal computers, portable devices, network access, and audio recording and editing software. One possible solution for copyright protection is audio watermarking. In this paper, we propose an effective and robust audio watermarking algorithm that employs both the discrete wavelet transform and the discrete cosine transform. The algorithm involves, first, pre-processing of the binary watermark image and then embedding it into the original audio by quantization of coefficients. Experiments on audio recordings of many different music styles confirm the robustness of the algorithm against a wide range of Stirmark attacks such as noise addition, compression, and filtering, as well as other common attacks.