Robust audio watermarking in the time domain

TLDR

The paper proposes a time‑domain audio watermarking technique to provide copyright protection for audio signals. The method embeds a key‑generated watermark directly into the audio in the time domain, adjusting the embedding strength based on the signal’s amplitude and frequency while ensuring perceptual similarity and enabling detection without the original audio. The watermark remains robust against common audio manipulations, including MPEG compression, cropping, time shifting, filtering, resampling, and requantization.

Abstract

The audio watermarking method proposed in this paper offers copyright protection to an audio signal by time domain processing. The strength of audio signal modifications is limited by the necessity to produce an output signal that is perceptually similar to the original one. The watermarking method presented here does not require the use of the original signal for watermark detection. The watermark signal is generated using a key, i.e., a single number known only to the copyright owner. Watermark embedding depends on the audio signal amplitude and frequency in a way that minimizes the audibility of the watermark signal. The embedded watermark is robust to common audio signal manipulations like MPEG audio coding, cropping, time shifting, filtering, resampling, and requantization.