Norm ratio-based audio watermarking scheme in DWT domain

Abstract

In order to reach a balance between robustness, imperceptibility, and data payload, a novel blind audio watermarking scheme is proposed using the norm ratio of approximate coefficients in discrete wavelet domain (DWT). A chaotic sequence generated by Tent map is used to encrypt the watermark image and enhance the security of watermarking system. Firstly the original audio signal is segmented into non-overlapping frames and DWT is applied to each frame. Then, the approximate components are divided into two parts, and the norm ratio is calculated and modulated to embed the watermarks. Finally, the approximate components are scaled by optimizing the quality of the watermarked audio. Experimental results indicate that the proposed watermarking scheme is robust against different common attacks, such as noise addition, resampling, re-quantization, MP3 compression and amplitude scaling. The comparison analysis shows that the proposed scheme has high data payload and provides superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art watermarking schemes.