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Secure logarithmic audio watermarking scheme based on the human auditory system

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Abstract

This paper proposes a high capacity audio watermarking algorithm in the logarithm domain based on the absolute threshold of hearing of the human auditory system (HAS), which makes this scheme a novel technique. When considering the fact that the human ear requires more precise samples at low amplitudes (soft sounds), the use of the logarithm helps us design a logarithmic quantization algorithm. The key idea is to divide the selected frequency band into short frames and quantize the samples based on the HAS. Using frames and the HAS improves the robustness, since embedding a secret bit into a set of samples is more reliable than embedding it into a single sample. In addition, the quantization level is adjusted according to the HAS. Apart from remarkable capacity, transparency and robustness, this scheme provides three parameters (frequency band, scale factor and frame size) which facilitate the regulation of the watermarking properties. The experimental results show that the method has a high capacity (800–7,000 bits per second), without significant perceptual distortion (ODG >1) and provides robustness against common audio signal processing such as added noise, filtering and MPEG compression (MP3).

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly funded by the Spanish Government through projects TSI2007-65406-C03-03 “E-AEGIS”, TIN2011-27076-C03-02 “CO-PRIVACY” and CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-0004 “ARES”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Mehdi Fallahpour

  2. Estudis d’Informàtica, Multimèdia i Telecomunicació, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    David Megías

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  1. Mehdi Fallahpour
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  2. David Megías
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Correspondence to Mehdi Fallahpour.

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Fallahpour, M., Megías, D. Secure logarithmic audio watermarking scheme based on the human auditory system. Multimedia Systems 20, 155–164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-013-0325-1

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