An improved detection technique for spread spectrum audio watermarking with a spectral envelope filter

We propose an improved algorithm for detecting audio watermarks based on a spread spectrum in the spectral domain. Since the energy of a watermark is much smaller than that of the cover audio data, pre-processing to reduce the effect of the cover data is needed to reliably extract watermarks. We introduce a spectral envelope filter as a pre-process that enhances detecting performance by filtering out the intrinsic spectral character of cover data. The proposed watermarking structure can be easily included in the compression system and can extract watermarks from partially decompressed spectral data. Our experimental results demonstrate that with a bit error rate of around 10 dB against general attacks, the proposed detecting scheme works better than detectors without the spectral filter.