Audio watermarking for acoustic propagation in reverberant environments

Digital audio watermarking has received increasing interest in the last years due to the wide range of applications it can be used for. This contribution presents a novel blind watermarking scheme designed to work in the very specific scenario in which the watermarked audio is played back by a loudspeaker and picked up by the microphone of a mobile device. The proposed scheme is robust against the impairments characterizing this scenario, namely reverberation, movement, microphone self-noise, and interfering sound sources. The conducted performance investigations, as well as the listening tests evaluating the audio quality demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed system.