AN INTRODUCTION TO AUDIO WATERMARKING

By Prof. Vishnu Narayan saxena

&
Prof Pooja saxena

1.1 Definition of audio watermarking
Digital audio watermarking is a technique for embedding additional data (for
example image) along with audio signal. Embedded data is used for copyright owner identification
Audio watermarking is used to hide information in audio signal. This data
should not be hearable to human ear and it should robust, so that it could be used for the purpose of
Intellectual Property Rights.
The watermark is a signal embedded into the host media to be protected, such as
an image or audio or video. It contains useful certifiable information for the owner of the host media,
such as producer's name, company logo, etc; the watermark can be detected or extracted later to make
an assertion about the host media. Audio watermarking is a technique that hides copyright information
into the digital audio signal. Embedded data not only must be imperceptible but also should resist
attacks and other types of distortions trying to remove or neutralize the watermark picture.
Audio watermarking is used to hide information in audio signal. This data
should not be hearable to human ear and it should robust, so that it could be used for the purpose of
Intellectual Property Rights.
In the process of watermarking there are two signals
[1] Host signal: The original signal (for example audio, video, image, text) which is to be protected from
unauthorized copying and distribution.
[2]Watermark: Watermark may be a binary data sequence or an image which is to be embedded as a
proof of ownership with host signal.






Fig (1.1) Process of watermarking




1.2 Need of watermarking

With the growth of the Internet, unauthorized copying and distribution of
digital media has never been easier. As a result, the music industry claims a multibillion dollar annual
revenue loss due to piracy. Normally an application is developed by a person or a small group of people
and used by many. Hackers are the people who tend to change the original application by modifying it
or use the same application to make profits without giving credit to the owner. So we do require a
technique which can protect our data from unauthorized copying and distribution and can provide
copyright owner identification for our digital data over internet.
Digital watermarking technology is now drawing attention as a new
method of protecting unauthorized copying of digital content. A digital watermark is an imperceptible
signal added to digital multimedia data (namely, audio, video, or image), which should remain even after
several signal processes or potential attacks.

1.3 Types of watermarking
According to the type host signal
(1)Text watermarking: If host or original signal is text then it is known as text watermarking.

(2)Audio watermarking: If host or original signal is an audio signal then it is known as audio
watermarking.

(3) Video watermarking: If host or original signal is video then it is known as video watermarking.

According to the detection process
(1)Blind watermarking: if original signal is not required for the extraction of watermark then it is known
as blind watermarking. Blind watermarking is also known as public watermarking.

(2)Non blind watermarking: if original signal is required for the extraction of watermark then
watermarking is known as non blind watermarking. Non blind watermarking is also known as private
watermarking

1.3 Applications of watermarking

[I] Ownership protection and proof of ownership: In ownership protection application, the
watermark embedded contains a unique proof of ownership. The embedded information is
robust and secure against attacks and can be demonstrated in a case of dispute of ownership.
There can be the situations where some other person modifies the embedded watermark and
claims that it is his own. In such cases the actual owner can use the watermark to show the
actual proof of ownership.

[II]Authentication and tampering detection: In this application additional secondary
information is embedded in the host signal and can be used to check if the host signal is
tampered. This situation is important because it is necessary to know about the tampering
caused to the media signal. The tampering is sometime a cause of forging of the watermark
which has to be avoided .In the content authentication applications, a set of secondary data is


embedded in the host multimedia signal and is later used to determine whether the host signal
was tampered.

[III]Copy control and access control: In the copy control application, the embedded watermark
represents a certain copy control or access control policy. A watermark detector is usually integrated in
a recording or playback system, like in the proposed DVD copy control algorithm or during the
development Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). After a watermark has been detected and content
decoded, the copy control or access control policy is enforced by directing particular hardware or
software operations such as enabling or disabling the record module. These applications require
watermarking algorithms resistant against intentional attacks and signal processing modifications, able
to perform a blind watermark detection and capable of embedding a non-trivial number of bits in the
host signal.

[IV]Information carrier: The embedded watermark in this application is expected to have a high
capacity and to be detected and decoded using a blind detection algorithm. While the robustness
against intentional attack is not required, a certain degree of robustness against common processing like
MPEG compression may be desired. A public watermark embedded into the host multimedia might be
used as the link to external databases that contain certain additional information about the multimedia
file itself, such as copyright information and licensing conditions

[V]Finger printing Additional data embedded by a watermark in the fingerprinting applications are
used to trace the originator or recipients of a particular copy of a multimedia file. The usage of an audio
file can be recorded by a fingerprinting system. When a file is accessed by a user, a watermark, or called
fingerprint in this case, is embedded into the file thus creating a mark on the audio. The usage history
can be traced by extracting all the watermarks that were embedded into the file

[VI]Broadcast monitoring: A variety of applications for audio watermarking are in the field of
broadcasting. Watermarking is an obvious alternative method of coding identification information for an
active broadcast monitoring. It has the advantage of being embedded within the multimedia host signal
itself rather than exploiting a particular segment of the broadcast signal. Thus, it is compatible with the
already installed base of broadcast equipment, including digital and analogue communication channels.

[VII]Medical applications: Watermarking can be used to write the unique name of the patient on the
X-ray reports or MRI scan reports. This application is important because it is highly advisable to have the
patients name entered on reports, and reduces the misplacements of reports which are very important
during treatment.

[VIII] Airline traffic monitoring: Watermarking is used in air traffic monitoring. The pilot
communicates with a ground monitoring system through voice at a particular frequency. However, it
can be easily trapped and attacked, and is one of the causes of miss communication. To avoid such
problems, the flight number is embedded into the voice communication between the ground operator
and the flight pilot. As the flight numbers are unique the tracking of flights will become more secure and
easy.





1.5 Requirement of watermarking
According to IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) audio
watermarking algorithms should meet certain requirements. The most significant requirements are
perceptibility, robustness, security, reliability, capacity, and speed performance.

[1] Imperceptibility: One of the important features of the watermarking technique is that the
watermarked signal should not lose the quality of the original signal. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) of
the watermarked signal to the original signal should be maintained greater than 20dB. In addition, the
technique should make the modified signal not perceivable by human ear.

[2]Robustness to signal processing attacks: Watermark should be robust against common signal
processing attacks such as lousy compression, linear filtering, Re sampling, Re quantization, cropping,
jittering, D/A and A/D conversion, Normal correlation (N.C.) is used for the measurement of robustness.

[3] Capacity: The efficient watermarking technique should be able to carry more information but
should not degrade the quality of the audio signal. It is also important to know if the watermark is
completely distributed over the host signal because, it is possible that near the extraction process a part
of the signal is only available. Hence, capacity is also a primary concern in the real time situations.

[4]Speed: Speed of embedding is one of the criteria for efficient watermarking technique. The speed of
embedding of watermark is important in real time applications where the embedding is done on
continuous signals such as speech of an official or conversation between airplane pilot and ground
control staff. Some of the possible applications where speed is a constraint are audio streaming and
airline traffic monitoring. Both embedding and extraction process need to be made as fast as possible
with greater efficiency.

[5] Security and cost: Cost is an important criterion which cannot be ignored and watermark should
be secure so that no one can know about our watermark.The security of a watermark refers to its ability
to resist hostile attacks. Hostile attack is the process specifically intended to thwart the watermarks
purpose. The types of attacks can fall in three categories: unauthorized removal, unauthorized
embedding, and unauthorized detection. The Cost of watermarking system refers to the speed with
which embedding and detection must be performed and the number of embedded and detectors that
must be deployed. Other issues include the whether the detector and embedded are to be implemented
as hardware device or as software application or plug-ins.

[6]Computational complexity: Computational complexity refers to the processing required to embed
watermark data into a host signal, and /or to extract the data from the signal. Algorithm complexity is
important to know, for it may influence the choice of implementation structure or DSP
architecture. Although there are many ways to measure complexity, such as complexity analysis
(or Big-O analysis), for practical applications more quantitative values are required . In this study,
actual CPU timings (in seconds) of algorithm implementations were collected.

[7] Asymmetry: If for the entire set of cover objects the watermark remains same then
extracting for one file will cause damage watermark of all the files. Thus, asymmetry is also a
noticeable concern. It is recommended to have unique watermarks to different files to help
make the technique more useful.


1.6 Problems and attacks on watermarking

[1] Compression: compression means to reduce the size of signal. Compression of audio signal is a very
common signal processing tool. Audio files are compressed when these files are stored at disk at server
or transmitted over a communication channel. Watermark should be robust against compression.
Audio generation is done at a particular sampling frequency and bit rate however the created
audio track will undergo so many different types of compression and conversion techniques.
Some of the most common compression techniques are audio compression techniques based
on psychoacoustic effect (MPEG and Advanced Audio Codec (AAC)). In addition to that, it is
common process that the original audio signal will change its sampling frequencies like from
128Kbps to 64Kpbs or 48 Kbps. There are some programs that can achieve these conversions
and perform compression operation.

[2] Re sampling: During Analog to digital conversion a signal can be Re sampled at different -different
sampling frequencies. when an audio signals converted from analog to digital first it sampled at nyquest
rate these samples are quantized and then encoded into digital signals and again when these digital
signals are converted back to analog signal first quantized than decoded into an analog signals and then
low pass filtered to produce an original audio signals During various signal processing Techniques a
signal may be re sampled at different rates(or when signal go through an intentional attack) so the
watermark should be embedded such that it will not effected more by re sampling attack.

[3] Re quantization: A signal can be Re quantized with different quantization Level as we change the
quantization level the quantization error also changed and no of bits used to represent per sample also
changed.
During analog to digital conversion of an audio signal an audio signal is first sampled at nyquest
rate than quantized during the process of quantization a quantization error is introduced
quantization error is simply the difference between the sampled value of the signal and
quantized value of the signal. The Quantization error is inversely proportional to the no of
quantization level if we increase the no of quantization level then quantization error will be
decreased and if we decrease the no of quantization level than quantization error increase.
Again as we increase the no of quantization level we do require a more no of bits to represent
the quantized sample and as we decrease the no of quantization level we do require a less no
of bit to represent the quantized value of sample. Hence there is a tradeoff between
quantization error and no of bits to encode the sample i.e. if we increase the no of bits then
quantization error decrease and if we decrease the no bits than quantization error increase. A
signal may go through a quantization attack during various signal processing and watermark
should be embedded such that it remain unaffected (less effected) after re quantization attack.

[4] Filtering: Filtering is used to filter certain frequency components of any signal or we can say
that it attenuates certain frequency component of any signal. Filtering is common practice,
which is used to amplify or attenuate some part of the signal. The basic low pass and high pass
filters can be used to achieve these types of attacks.



[5] Additive white Gaussian noise attacks: A.W.G.N. can be added to watermark signal during
attack. It is common practice to notice the presence of noise in a signal when transmitted.
Hence, watermarking algorithm should make the technique robust against the noise attacks. It
is recommended to check the algorithm for this type of noise by adding the host signal by an
additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) to check its robustness.

[6]Cropping: Cropping means to crop the some portion of the signal or replace with an another
signal the watermark should be distributed over the signal such that it will effected very less by
cropping attack.

[7] Dynamics: The amplitude modification and attenuation provide the dynamics of the attacks.
Limiting, expansion and compressions are some sort of more complicated applications which
are the non-linear modifications. Some of these types of attacks are re-quantization.

[8] Ambience: In some situations the audio signal gets delayed or there are situations where in
people record signal from a source and claim that the track is theirs. Those situations can be
simulated in a room, which is of great importance to check the performance of an audio signal.

[9] Time stretch and pitch shift: These attacks change either the length of the signal without
changing its pitch and vice versa. These are some de-synchronization attacks which are quite
common in the data transmission. Jittering is one type of such attack. Embedded in the host
signal itself which is one of the main advantages of the technique.


1.7 Performance Parameters
There are following performance parameters which we are using

[1] Signal to noise ratio for Perceptual Quality
[2] Normalized Correlation for Robustness

1.7.1 Signal to noise ratio (S.N.R.): The S.N.R. is used for the measurement of perceptual quality
(inaudibility) of watermarked signal. In order to evaluate the imperceptibility of watermarked signal, the
following signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) equation is used.

(1.1)
Where
S (n) is a host audio signal of length N samples and
S (n) be watermarked audio signal.
Subjective Quality evaluation
The inaudibility of our watermarking method has been done by listening tests involving ten persons.
Each listener was presented with the pairs of original signal and the watermarked signal and was asked
to report whether any difference could be detected between the two signals. The ten people listed to


each pair for 10 times and they have a grade for this pair, using the ITU-R BS.1284 standardized 5-point
grading scale [15]. The average grade for of each pair from all listeners is the final grade for this pair.
Table 1. Grading Scale (ITU-R)
Grade Quality Impairment
5 Excellent Imperceptible
4 Good Perceptible but not annoying
3 Fair Slightly annoying
2 Poor Annoying
1 Bad Very Annoying

1.7.2 Normalized correlation

Normalized correlation (N.C.) is used for the measurement of robustness of watermark against various
signal processing attacks like Re sampling, Re quantization, Compression, low pass filtering, cropping
etc. N.C. (normal correlation) can be a more sensible measure for expressing the robustness of the audio
watermarking algorithm. Correlation is the measure of similarity between two signals. Correlation can
be measured by using normalized signal which is termed as normalized correlation. Normal correlation
can be calculated as
. (1.2)

In above equation w and w are original and extracted watermarks and i and j are indexes of watermark
image. In fact, by setting a threshold value for NC, the receiver can decide whether the extracted
watermark correlates (is similar) with the signature embedded watermark.

1.8 Objective of thesis:
Main object of our thesis is to achieve the best optimum level between various requirements of
watermarking and to make our watermark robust against various intentional and unintentional signal
processing attacks Such as Compression, Low pass filtering, Re sampling, Re quantization, cropping,
Adding Gaussian white noise etc and to achieve high perceptual quality. In the other word we can say to
achieve best optimum level between signal to noise ratio and normal correlation.