Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Two channel digital watermarking for music based on exponential time-spread echo kernel

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Signal, Image and Video Processing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

To robustly and imperceptibly embed copyright information as a watermark into music clips, a two channel digital watermarking system based on the least significant bit (LSB) method and echo hiding (EH) with a new exponential time-spread echo kernel (ETEK) is proposed. By spreading the echo so that it seems like natural room reverberation, as well as the use of two channels to separately watermark by the LSB method and the EH method which have complementary characteristics, the system provides satisfactory sound quality and exhibits both efficient retrieval capacity and robustness against attacks. Experiments show that the proposed system retrieves watermarks with 100% accuracy for all clips and is almost imperceptible. With a set of 42 attacks supplied by the StirMark Benchmark for Audio (SMBA), the proposed system has an average robustness of 0.98 where the ideal value is 1.00, and higher than any conventional methods. With these results, the proposed system is shown to be possible for the application to music distribution over the Internet.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bender W., Gruhl D., Morimoto N.: Techniques for data hiding. IBM Syst. J. 35(3), 313–336 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Swanson M.D., Zhu B., Twefik A.H., Boney L.: Robust audio watermarking using perceptual masking. Signal Process. 66(3), 337–355 (1998)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Cvejic N., Seppanen T.: Spread spectrum audio watermarking using frequency hopping and attack characterization. Signal Process. 84(1), 207–213 (2004)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Li, X., Yu, H.H.: Transparent and robust audio data hiding in cepstrum domain. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), New York, pp. 397–400 (2000)

  5. Lee S.K., Ho Y.S.: Digital audio watermarking in the cepstrum domain. IEEE Trans. Consum. Electron. 46(3), 744–750 (2000)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  6. Yeh, H., Kuo, J.: Digital watermarking through quasi m-arrays. In: Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems, Taipei, pp. 456–461 (2004)

  7. Gruhl, D., Lu, A., Bender, W.: Echo hiding. In: Proceedings of Information Hiding, Cambridge, pp. 295–316 (1996)

  8. Sehirli, M., Gurgen, F.S., IkizogluMurat, S.: Performance evaluation of digital audio watermarking techniques designed in time, frequency and cepstrum domains. ADVIS 2004. LNCS 3261, Turkey, pp. 430–440 (2004)

  9. Oh, H.O., Seok, J.W., Hong, J.W., Youn, D.H.: New echo embedding technique for robust and imperceptible audio watermarking. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Salt Lake City, pp. 1341–1344 (2001)

  10. Foo, S.W., Yeo, T.H., Huang, D.Y.: An adaptive audio watermarking system. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Electrical and Electronic Technology, Singapore, pp. 509–513 (2001)

  11. Kim H.J., Choi Y.H.: A novel echo-hiding scheme with backward and forward kernels. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. 13(8), 885–889 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Ko B.S., Nishimura R., Suzuki Y.: Time-spread echo method for digital audio watermarking. IEEE Trans. Multimed. 7(2), 212–221 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. ITU-R Recommendation BS.: 1387, Method for objective measurements of perceived audio quality, 1998. http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-bs/en (1998)

  14. Lerch, A.: Zplane Development, EAQUAL—Evaluation of Audio Quality, Version: 0.1.3alpha. http://www.mp3-tech.org/programmer/misc.html (2002)

  15. Lang, A., Dittmann, J., Spring, R., Vielhauer, C.: Audio watermark attacks: from single to profile attacks. In: Proceedings of Multimedia and Security, MM&Sec’05, New York, pp. 39–50 (2005)

  16. Lang, A., Dittmann, J., Spring, R., Vielhauer, C.: Application oriented audio watermark benchmark service. In: Proceedings of Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VII, Washington, pp. 275–286 (2005)

  17. Lang, A.: Stirmark Benchmark for Audio—list and description of attacks. http://wwwiti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/alang/smba.php (2005)

  18. Dittman, J., Megias, D., Lang, A., Herrera-JoanComarti, J.: Theoretical framework for a practical evaluation and comparision of audio watermarking schemes in the triangle of robustness, transparency and capacity. LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, pp. 1–43 (2006)

  19. Lu C., Huang S., Liao H.: Cocktail watermarking for digital image protection. IEEE Trans. Multimed. 2(4), 209–224 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Dittmann, J., Lang, A., Steinebach, M.: Stirmark benchmark: audio watermarking attacks based on lossy compression. In: Proceedings of SPIE, vol. 4675, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IV, pp. 79–90 (2002)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, G3-49, 4259 Nagatsuta, Midori-ku, Yokohama, 226-8502, Japan

    Nguyen Thi Huong Lien, Fangyan Dong & Kaoru Hirota

  2. Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies, University of Tsukuba, Tenoudai 1-1-1, Tsukuba Science City, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan

    Hajime Nobuhara

Authors
  1. Nguyen Thi Huong Lien
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hajime Nobuhara
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Fangyan Dong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Kaoru Hirota
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nguyen Thi Huong Lien.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lien, N.T.H., Nobuhara, H., Dong, F. et al. Two channel digital watermarking for music based on exponential time-spread echo kernel. SIViP 3, 115–126 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-008-0063-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-008-0063-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation