Audio watermarking scheme based on singular spectrum analysis and psychoacoustic model with self-synchronization

Abstract

This paper proposes a blind, inaudible, and robust audio watermarking scheme based on singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and the psychoacoustic model 1 (ISO/IEC 11172-3). In this work, SSA is used to analyze the host signals and to extract the singular spectra. A watermark is embedded into the host signals by modifying the singular spectra which are in the convex part of the singular spectrum curve so that this part becomes concave. This modification certainly affects the inaudibility and robustness properties of the watermarking scheme. To satisfy both properties, the modified part of the singular spectrum is determined by a novel parameter selection method based on the psychoacoustic model. The test results showed that the proposed scheme achieves not only inaudibility and robustness but also blindness. In addition, this work showed that the extraction process of a variant of the proposed scheme can extract the watermark without assuming to know the frame positions in advance and without embedding additional synchronization code into the audio content.