A blind digital audio watermarking scheme based on EMD and UISA techniques

In this paper, a new perceptual spread spectrum audio watermarking scheme is discussed. The watermark embedding process is performed in the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) domain, and the hybrid watermark extraction process is based on the combination of EMD and ISA (Independent Subspace Analysis) techniques, followed by the generic detection system, i.e. inverse perceptual filter, predictor filter and correlation based detector. Since the EMD decomposes the audio signal into several oscillating components–the intrinsic mode functions (IMF)–the watermark information can be inserted in more than one IMF, using spread spectrum modulation, allowing hence the increase of the insertion capacity. The imperceptibility of the inserted data is ensured by the use of a psychoacoustical model. The blind extraction of the watermark signal, from the received watermarked audio, consists in the separation of the watermark from the IMFs of the received audio signal. The separation is achieved by a new proposed under-determined ISA method, here referred to as UISA. The proposed hybrid watermarking system was applied to the SQAM (Sound Quality Assessment Material) audio database (Available at http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/audio/sqam/) and proved to have efficient detection performances in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) compared to a generic perceptual spread spectrum watermarking system. The perceptual quality of the watermarked audio was objectively assessed using the PEMO-Q (Tool for objective perceptual assessment of audio quality) algorithm. Also, using our technique, we can extract the different watermarks without using any information of original signal or the inserted watermark. Experimental results exhibit that the transparency and high robustness of the watermarked audio can be achieved simultaneously with a substantial increase of the amount of information transmitted. A reliability of 1.8 10 − 4 (against 1.5 10 − 2 for the generic system), for a bit rate of 400 bits/s, can be achieved when the channel is not disturbed.