Highly Robust, Secure, and Perceptual-Quality Echo Hiding Scheme

Audio watermarking using echo hiding has fairly good perceptual quality. However, security and the tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility are still relevant issues. This paper presents the echo hiding scheme in which the analysis-by-synthesis approach, interlaced kernels, and frequency hopping are adopted to achieve high robustness, security, and perceptual quality. The amplitudes of the embedded echoes are adequately adapted during the embedding process by considering not only the characteristics of the host signals, but also cases in which the watermarked audio signals have suffered various attacks. Additionally, the interlaced kernels are introduced such that the echo positions of the interlaced kernels for embedding "zero" and "one" are interchanged alternately to minimize the influence of host signals and various attacks on the watermarked data. Frequency hopping is employed to increase the robustness and security of the proposed echo hiding scheme in which each audio segment for watermarking is established by combining the fractions selected from all frequency bands based on a pseudonoise sequence as a secret key. Experimental results indicate that the proposed analysis-by-synthesis echo hiding scheme is superior to the conventional schemes in terms of robustness, security, and perceptual quality.