Title: Robust audio watermarking based on multi-carrier modulation

Authors: Mohammed Khalil; Abdellah Adib

Addresses: LIM@II-FSTM, B.P. 146 Mohammedia 20650, Morocco ' LIM@II-FSTM, B.P. 146 Mohammedia 20650, Morocco

Abstract: The great challenge, in blind audio watermarking, is to recover the transparent embedded information with minimum errors even in presence of disturbances. Some signal disturbances like MPEG compression and filtering can be modelled as fading-like distortions. Besides the inaudibility constraint, the problem will be viewed as the conception of a particular communication system, where our purpose is to reduce host interference noise (HIN) and inter-symbol interference (ISI) on one hand and to deal with fading perturbations on the other hand. In this paper, we propose adapting multi-carrier (MC) modulation, widely used in wireless communications, to the watermarking context. Our main motivation is to exploit advantages of MC modulations in order to outperform spread spectrum (SS) audio watermarking schemes. The new MC-watermarking system allows us to improve detection reliability and to increase robustness of the embedded watermark. Moreover, the inaudibility constraint will be ensured by adapting the MC signal parameters to the masking characteristics of the human auditory system (HAS).

Keywords: audio watermarking; multi-carrier modulation; fading; OFDM; orthogonal frequency division multiplexing; compression; guard interval; robustness; detection reliability; inaudibility; security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2016.073766

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2016 Vol.6 No.1/2, pp.180 - 194

Received: 08 Jan 2014
Accepted: 03 Feb 2015
Published online: 18 Dec 2015 *

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