Survey of imperceptible and robust digital audio watermarking systems

Robustness, imperceptibility and embedding capacity are the preliminary requirements of any digital audio watermarking technique. However, research has concluded that these requirements are difficult to achieve at the same time. Thus, the watermarking technique is closely dependent on the solution that manages the robustness / imperceptibility trade-off. A large majority of research work has been devoted to improving this trade-off by implementing increasingly advanced techniques. For conciseness and efficiency, the comprehensive review reported in this paper mainly considers the following aspects imperceptibility and robustness among the criteria, as they determine the key performance of most existing audio watermarking systems. In this paper we have introduce the basic concepts of digital audio watermarking, the performance characteristics, and a classification of digital audio watermarking systems according to the extraction/detection process or to human perception. We have also presented various digital audio watermarking applications. Further, we have presented classifications of unintentional and intentional attacks that can be performed on audio watermarking systems and we have highlighted the impact of these attacks on the watermarked audio quality. We have presented two classifications made by researchers, the first one categorizes these attacks into basic and advanced attacks, while the second one classifies the attacks by group according to the process performed on the watermarked audio file. Furthermore, after presenting an overview of the properties of the Human Auditory System (HAS), we have presented several evaluation aspects of audio watermarking systems and we have reviewed various recent robust and imperceptible audio watermarking methods in the spatial, transform and hybrid domains. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024.