Audio Watermarking Schemes: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The growth of internet and its reachability to all sectors of people have never been greater. Internet has become the best marketplace, the best library and may be the best guide for everything. But this revolution comes with some bigger problems. One of the most challenging problems among them would be copyright protection of digital data being transferred over internet. Digital images, videos and audios undergo illegal re-production and re-distributions, tampering and other acts of copyright violation. This is proved to have leading the film and other prominent industries to loss of millions of dollars per year. Encrypting the data provides security to it. In this case only people who pay to buy the secret key that should be used for decryption can use the data. But the problem is that once decrypted, the data can be re-produced into any number of copies and can be re-distributed without any permission from the author. Watermarking is an intelligent solution for this problem where the presence of watermark can be checked to distinguish pirated copies from the actual ones. A lot of methods have been developed for image and video watermarking, but the research on audio watermarking started a little bit later. The reason might be the fact that audio watermarking is tedious compared to image and video as Human Auditory System (HAS) is more sensitive compared to Human Visionary System. So ensuring the imperceptibility of audio watermarks is a tougher task. In this thesis various audio watermarking schemes introduced so far in the literature and their merits and demerits are studied.