High-capacity, transparent and robust audio watermarking based on synergy between DCT transform and LU decomposition using genetic algorithm

Digital watermarking technology is countered as one of the best solutions for solving the problem of copyright protection, content identification, duplication, data authentication and distribution of the digital media due to the great developments in Internet technology. Lately, protection of digital audio signals has fascinated the attention of researchers in watermarking area. In this paper, we propose a new high-capacity, transparent and robust audio watermarking scheme based on synergy DCT transform and LU decomposition using genetic algorithm (GA) for embedding watermark data into an audio signal. In the proposed scheme, the original audio signal is first split into set of segments, and then each segment is taken DCT transform. After then, DCT coefficients are framed and finally decomposed by LU factorization to obtain upper and lower-triangular matrices. GA is applied to optimally select frequency sub-band and frame length. The watermark data is embedded into upper-triangular matrices based on Fibonacci sequence. The watermark can be blindly drawn out without knowledge of the original audio signal. Experimental results show that the transparency and robustness of the proposed scheme is satisfied, and that high watermarking payload capacity (2002 bit per second) is obtained through the proposed watermarking scheme.