Spread-spectrum watermarking of audio signals

TLDR

Watermarking is widely used for multimedia copyright protection and for embedding robust, format‑independent metadata in audio and video signals. The paper proposes new direct‑sequence spread‑spectrum watermarking techniques to enhance detection robustness, imperceptibility, resistance to desynchronization and removal attacks, and enable covert communication over public audio channels. The authors evaluate the security and robustness of the proposed methods on a benchmark suite that includes time‑ and frequency‑scaling, wow‑and‑flutter, additive and multiplicative noise, resampling, requantization, noise reduction, and filtering.

Abstract

Watermarking has become a technology of choice for a broad range of multimedia copyright protection applications. Watermarks have also been used to embed format-independent metadata in audio/video signals in a way that is robust to common editing. In this paper, we present several novel mechanisms for effective encoding and detection of direct-sequence spread-spectrum watermarks in audio signals. The developed techniques aim at (i) improving detection convergence and robustness, (ii) improving watermark imperceptiveness, (iii) preventing desynchronization attacks, (iv) alleviating estimation/removal attacks, and finally, (v) establishing covert communication over a public audio channel. We explore the security implications of the developed mechanisms and review watermark robustness on a benchmark suite that includes a combination of audio processing primitives including: time- and frequency-scaling with wow-and-flutter, additive and multiplicative noise, resampling, requantization, noise reduction, and filtering.