An Audio Watermark Designed for Efficient and Robust Resynchronization After Analog Playback

We propose a spread spectrum (SS) audio watermark designed to withstand analog playback, including desynchronization caused by small differences between playback and recording rates. Desynchronization robustness relies on detecting short blocks of a magnitude-only watermark embedded in the frequency domain where the resolution of the SS chips can be reduced. Lost spreading gain due to the lower number of SS chips is compensated using blind dynamic time warping (DTW) detection (does not access original signal). DTW aligns sequences of blocks to improve robustness to interference while mitigating the vulnerabilities of long SS sequences to desynchronization. Results demonstrate that the proposed watermark survives analog playback and warping up to ±2%. Additionally, compared with a recent baseline scheme that uses brute force resampling to search for resynchronization, the proposed watermark is 300 times more computationally efficient, and does not compromise robustness to either desynchronization (e.g., jitter, resampling, time warping, frequency scaling) or non-desynchronizing modifications (e.g., AAC compression and additive noise).

[1]  Biing-Hwang Juang,et al.  Fundamentals of speech recognition , 1993, Prentice Hall signal processing series.

[2]  A. W. M. van den Enden,et al.  Discrete Time Signal Processing , 1989 .

[3]  Gustavo M. Calixto,et al.  Effectiveness analysis of audio watermark tags for IPTV second screen applications and synchronization , 2014, 2014 International Telecommunications Symposium (ITS).

[4]  Darko Kirovski,et al.  Spread-spectrum watermarking of audio signals , 2003, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[5]  Xiao-Ming Chen,et al.  A Phase-Based Audio Watermarking System Robust to Acoustic Path Propagation , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[6]  Christopher Howson,et al.  Second screen TV synchronization , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics -Berlin (ICCE-Berlin).

[7]  Bertrand Chupeau,et al.  Temporal Video Registration for Watermark Detection , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings.

[8]  Xiang-Yang Wang,et al.  A Novel Synchronization Invariant Audio Watermarking Scheme Based on DWT and DCT , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

[9]  Gwenaël J Doërr.  Watermark resynchronization based on Elastic Graph Matching , 2005 .

[10]  Gaurav Sharma,et al.  Self-synchronization for spread spectrum audio watermarks after time scale modification , 2014, Electronic Imaging.

[11]  HuangJiwu,et al.  Twenty years of digital audio watermarking-a comprehensive review , 2016 .

[12]  Teddy Furon,et al.  Broken Arrows , 2008, EURASIP J. Inf. Secur..

[13]  Song Guo,et al.  Spread Spectrum-Based High Embedding Capacity Watermarking Method for Audio Signals , 2015, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[14]  Information technology — Coding of audio-visual objects — Part 3 : Audio Technologies de l ' information — Codage des objets audiovisuels — Partie , 1999 .

[15]  Chi-Man Pun,et al.  Robust Segments Detector for De-Synchronization Resilient Audio Watermarking , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[16]  Nazim Fatès,et al.  StirMark benchmark: audio watermarking attacks , 2001, Proceedings International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing.

[17]  Henrique S. Malvar,et al.  Improved spread spectrum: a new modulation technique for robust watermarking , 2003, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..

[18]  Gaurav Sharma,et al.  Insertion, Deletion Codes With Feature-Based Embedding: A New Paradigm for Watermark Synchronization With Applications to Speech Watermarking , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[19]  Charles W. Therrien,et al.  Probability and Random Processes for Electrical and Computer Engineers , 2011 .

[20]  Michael Arnold,et al.  Simulating large scale acoustic path benchmarking , 2012, Other Conferences.

[21]  Jiwu Huang,et al.  Twenty years of digital audio watermarking - a comprehensive review , 2016, Signal Process..

[22]  Michael Arnold,et al.  A Phase Modulation Audio Watermarking Technique , 2009, Information Hiding.

[23]  Cyrille Siclet,et al.  Toward robustness of audio watermarking systems to acoustic channels , 2010, 2010 18th European Signal Processing Conference.

[24]  Rui Yang,et al.  Geometric Invariant Audio Watermarking Based on an LCM Feature , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

[25]  S. Biyiksiz,et al.  Multirate digital signal processing , 1985, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[26]  Mauro Barni,et al.  Effectiveness of exhaustive search and template matching against watermark desynchronization , 2005, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[27]  Jiwu Huang,et al.  Efficiently self-synchronized audio watermarking for assured audio data transmission , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting.

[28]  Song Guo,et al.  Patchwork-Based Audio Watermarking Method Robust to De-synchronization Attacks , 2014, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[29]  Pablo César,et al.  Leveraging user impact: an architecture for secondary screens usage in interactive television , 2009, Multimedia Systems.

[30]  John A. Gubner.  Probability and Random Processes for Electrical and Computer Engineers , 2006 .

[31]  Mauro Barni,et al.  Coping with local geometric attacks by means of optic-flow-based resynchronization for robust watermarking , 2005, IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging.

[32]  Xiangyang Wang,et al.  A robust content based audio watermarking using UDWT and invariant histogram , 2010, Multimedia Tools and Applications.

[33]  Alvin F. Martin,et al.  The DET curve in assessment of detection task performance , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

[34]  Yusuk Lim,et al.  Recovering Modified Watermarked Audio Based on Dynamic Time-Warping Technique , 2002 .

[35]  Ingemar J. Cox,et al.  Digital Watermarking and Steganography , 2014 .