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Robust patchwork-based watermarking method for stereo audio signals

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Abstract

This paper presents a patchwork-based watermarking method for stereo audio signals, which exploits the similarity of the two sound channels of stereo signals. Given a segment of stereo signal, we first compute the discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) of the two sound channels, which yields two sets of DFT coefficients. The DFT coefficients corresponding to certain frequency range are divided into multiple subsegment pairs and a criterion is proposed to select those suitable for watermark embedding. Then a watermark is embedded into the selected subsegment pairs by modifying their DFT coefficients. The exact way of modification is determined by a secret key, the watermark to be embedded, and the DFT coefficients themselves. In the decoding process, the subsegment pairs containing watermarks are identified by another criterion. Then the secret key is used to extract the watermark from the watermarked subsegments. Compared to the existing patchwork methods for audio watermarking, the proposed method does not require knowledge of which segments of the watermarked audio signal contain watermarks and is more robust to conventional attacks.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Australian Research Council under grants DP1095498 and DP110102076, the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under grant 2011CB302201, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 61172180.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Burwood Campus, Melbourne, VIC, 3125, Australia

    Iynkaran Natgunanathan & Yong Xiang

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, 6102, Australia

    Yue Rong

  3. Machine Intelligence Laboratory, College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China

    Dezhong Peng

Authors
  1. Iynkaran Natgunanathan
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  2. Yong Xiang
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  3. Yue Rong
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  4. Dezhong Peng
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Correspondence to Yong Xiang.

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Natgunanathan, I., Xiang, Y., Rong, Y. et al. Robust patchwork-based watermarking method for stereo audio signals. Multimed Tools Appl 72, 1387–1410 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1454-4

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