Digital Audio watermarking using perceptual masking: A Review

Abstract

Sharing electronic files on the internet has grown extremely fast over the last decade due to large volume of the mobile phones. These files include diverse forms of multimedia such as music, video, text and image. However digital files can be easily copied distributed and altered leading to copyright infringement. It is this ease of reproducing that causes copyright violations. Composers and distributors are more focused on implementing digital watermarking techniques to protect their material against illegal copying. Digital audio watermarking technique protects intellectual property by embedding watermark data into the audio file and recovering that information without affecting the audio quality of the original data. In this paper an overview of fundamental concepts of digital audio watermarking using perceptual masking is presented which includes a watermarking procedure to embed copyright protection into digital audio by directly modifying the audio samples. The procedure directly exploits temporal and frequency perceptual masking to guarantee that the embedded watermark is inaudible and robust. The watermark is constructed by breaking each audio clip into smaller segments and adding a perceptually shaped pseudo-random sequence. The noise-like watermark is statistically undetectable to prevent unauthorized removal. Keywords -Audio watermarking, Copyright Protection, Embedding, Frequency Masking Perceptual masking, Psychoacoustic Auditory Model, Temporal Masking.