Robust audio watermarking for copyright protection

A digital audio watermarking scheme of low complexity is proposed in this research as an effective way to deter users from misusing or illegally distributing audio data. Previous work on audio watermarking has primarily focused on the inaudibility of the embedded watermark and its robustness against attacks such as compression and noise. In this research, special attention is paid to the synchronization attack caused by casual audio editing or malicious random cropping, which is a low-cost yet effective attack to watermarking algorithms developed before. The proposed scheme is based on audio content analysis and watermark embedding in the Fourier transform domain. A blind watermark detection technique is developed to identify the embedded watermark under various types of attacks.