A novel audio watermarking algorithm based on neighboring samples

A simple and effective audio watermarking algorithm based in time domain is proposed in this paper for controlling the unauthorized distribution of copyright audio. The algorithm makes use of the advantages of both embedding a watermark bit to an individual sample and embedding a bit to a group or frame of samples. Here, a frame of three positive valued samples is used to define the amount of distortion to be added but only the middle sample is distorted based on the decision. Based on the watermark bit either “0” or “1”, the middle sample of a frame is made equal to one of the neighboring samples. Thus, the watermarked audio has a very good perceptual quality. Experimental results show that our new audio watermarking algorithm is not only imperceptible, but also robust against various common signal processing attacks such as amplitude modification, re-sampling, low-pass filtering, re-quantization, MP3 compression, etc. Though proposed in time domain but the algorithm can be implemented in any transform domains with little or no modification.