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A new DCT audio watermarking scheme based on preliminary MP3 study
Charfeddine M., El’arbi M., Ben Amar C. Multimedia Tools and Applications70 (3):1521-1557,2014.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Jul 25 2014

Steganography is the art of hiding extraneous information within data. With the explosion of piracy, content providers look at techniques such as digital watermarking as a way to protect their intellectual property (IP) rights by tagging works with presumably user-invisible copyright information that can later be used to prosecute pirates. For audio files, quite often represented via the ubiquitous, frequency-based MP3 compression scheme, an approach already tested by the authors was to store the watermarking bits in the audio spectrum, obtained via a discrete cosine transform (DCT). A trained neural network was used to perform the actual encoding by modifying frequency amplitudes according to the value of the tag bits and the estimates provided by the neural network, using eight-neighbor patterns.

This new paper builds upon this previous design by suggesting a more sophisticated way of deciding which audio spectrum sub-band should be modified to store the copyright tag in order to reduce sound distortion as much as possible, ensuring non-discoverability. This offline approach encodes the audio files using both 128 and 96 kb/s formats to discover this best frequency band, usually in the mid-frequency range. Compared to the previous approach and other techniques, this heuristic provides better results, both numerically and subjectively, in terms of robustness (with respect to various data alteration schemes) and perceptual quality. An application to video watermarking is also discussed. This easy-to-read and experimentally solid paper, while incremental, should be of interest to both engineers engaged in the study of audio compression and those dealing with copyright issues.

Reviewer:  P. Jouvelot Review #: CR142551 (1410-0885)
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Sound And Music Computing (H.5.5 )
 
 
Audio Input/ Output (H.5.1 ... )
 
 
Copyrights (K.5.1 ... )
 
 
Data Compaction And Compression (E.4 ... )
 
 
Compression (Coding) (I.4.2 )
 
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