Secure and robust high quality DWT domain audio watermarking algorithm with binary image

Abstract

To enhance security and robustness of digital audio watermarking algorithms, this paper presents an algorithm based on mean-quantization in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. A binary image is used as a watermark, and is encrypted with chaotic encryption with secret key. This approach is based on the embedding of an encrypted watermark in the low frequency components using a two wavelet functions with adaptation to the frame size. The reason for embedding the watermark in the low frequency components is that these components' energy is high enough to embed the watermark in such a way that the watermark is inaudible; therefore, it should not alter the audible content and should not be easy to remove. The algorithm has a good security because only the authorized can detect the copyright information embedded to the host audio signal. The watermark can be blindly extracted without knowledge of the original signal. To evaluate the performance of the presented audio watermarking method, objective quality tests including bit error rate (BER), normalized cross correlation(NCC), peak-signal to noise ratio (PSNR) are conducted for the watermark and Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR) for audio signals. The tests' results show that the approach maintains high audio quality, and yields a high recovery rate after attacks by commonly used audio data manipulations such as noise addition, amplitude modification, low-pass filtering, re-quantization, re-sampling, cropping, cutting, and compression. Simulation results show that our approach not only makes sure robustness against common attacks, but it also further improves systemic security and robustness against malicious attack.