Transparency benchmarking on audio watermarks and steganography

Abstract

The evaluation of transparency plays an important role in the context of watermarking and steganography algorithms. This paper introduces a general definition of the term transparency in the context of steganography, digital watermarking and attack based evaluation of digital watermarking algorithms. For this purpose the term transparency is first considered individually for each of the three application fields (steganography, digital watermarking and watermarking algorithm evaluation). From the three results a general definition for the overall context is derived in a second step. The relevance and applicability of the definition given is evaluated in practise using existing audio watermarking and steganography algorithms (which work in time, frequency and wavelet domain) as well as an attack based evaluation suite for audio watermarking benchmarking - StirMark for Audio (SMBA). For this purpose selected attacks from the SMBA suite are modified by adding transparency enhancing measures using a psychoacoustic model. The transparency and robustness of the evaluated audio watermarking algorithms by using the original and modifid attacks are compared. The results of this paper show hat transparency benchmarking will lead to new information regarding the algorithms under observation and their usage. This information can result in concrete recommendations for modification, like the ones resulting from the tests performed here.