Archives of Acoustics, 39, 4, pp. 529-539, 2014
10.2478/aoa-2014-0057

A Multi-Level Robust and Perceptually Transparent Blind Audio Watermarking Scheme Using Wavelets

Farooq HUSAIN
Moradabad Institute of Technology, MORADABAD-244001, INDIA
India

Omar FAROOQ
ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY, ALIGARH, INDIA
India

Ekrqam KHAN
ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY, ALIGARH, INDIA
India

In this paper, a robust and perceptually transparent single-level and multi-level blind audio watermarking scheme using wavelets is proposed. A randomly generated binary sequence is used as a watermark, and wavelet function coding is used to embed the watermark sequence in audio signals. Multi-level watermarking is used to enhance payload capacity and can be used for a different level of security. The robustness of the scheme is evaluated by applying different attacks such as filtering, sampling rate alteration, compression, noise addition, amplitude scaling, and cropping. The simulation results obtained show that the proposed watermarking scheme is resilient to various attacks except cropping. Perceptual transparency of watermark is measured by using Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ) basic model of ITU-R (PEAQ ITU-R BS.1387) on Speech Quality Assessing Material (SQAM) given by European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Average Objective Difference Grade (ODG) measured for this method is −0.067 and −0.080 for single-level and multi-level watermarked audio signals, respectively. In the proposed single-level digital audio watermarking scheme, the payload capacity is increased by 19.05% as compared to the single-level Chirp-Based Digital Audio Watermarking (CB-DAWM) scheme.
Keywords: digital audio watermarking, robustness, single-level watermarking, multi-level watermarking, pay-load capacity.
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Copyright © Polish Academy of Sciences & Institute of Fundamental Technological Research (IPPT PAN).

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DOI: 10.2478/aoa-2014-0057