Audio Watermarking Using Independent Component Analysis

This paper presents a blind watermark detection scheme for an additive watermark embedding model. The proposed estimation-correlation-based watermark detector first estimates the embedded watermark by exploiting non-Gaussian of the real-world audio signal and the mutual independence between the host-signal and the embedded watermark and then a correlation-based detector is used to determine the presence or the absence of the watermark. For watermark estimation, blind source separation (BSS) based on independent component analysis (ICA) is used. Low watermark-to-signal ratio (WSR) is one of the limitations of blind detection with the additive embedding model. The proposed detector uses two-stage processing to improve the WSR at the blind detector; the first stage removes the audio spectrum from the watermarked audio signal using linear predictive (LP) filtering and the second stage uses the resulting residue from the LP filtering stage to estimate the embedded watermark using BSS based on ICA. Simulation results show that the proposed detector performs significantly better than existing estimation-correlationbased detection schemes.