Controlling the inaudibility and maximizing the robustness in an audio annotation watermarking system

This paper presents the complete design of an audio data hiding system destined to transmit a binary information via the audio communication channel for audio annotation applications. The proposed system is based on an innovative embedding strategy. It consists of 1) a new inaudibility control procedure that locally regulates the watermark transparency, 2) an informed embedding function that maximizes system robustness to additive channel perturbation by using a new criterion of robustness - that is by maintaining the error probability at a fixed value, and 3) an efficient and low computational cost synchronization mechanism. System performance in terms of inaudibility of the watermark, transmission reliability with respect to various perturbations, and computational cost is evaluated on real audio signals to determine the efficiency of the proposed embedding strategy.