Audio Watermarking: More Than Meets the Ear

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the digital audio watermarking systems, including description of recently developed watermarking algorithms and an overview on the existing applications that use different audio watermarking methods. Audio watermarking algorithms are characterised by six essential properties, namely: perceptual transparency,watermark bit rate, robustness, blind/informedwatermark detection, security and computational complexity. Psychoacoustic models of the HAS that are exploited in order to preserve the subjective quality of the watermarked audio during the watermarking process are shortly reviewed. The most common watermark embedding techniques ranging from the simple LSB scheme to the various spread spectrum methods are presented. Application areas that have recently been developed and possible future applications areas are listed as well.