Hardware implementation of audio watermarking - covert communication

The hardware implementation of an audio watermarking helps to achieve real time performance by integrating an audio watermarking chip with an existing audio electronic devices. For the secure communication of the secret messages and for the data protection, the watermarking should provide good imperceptible, good robustness, high capacity (pay load) and high speed. This paper presents a new VLSI architecture to implement an audio watermarking using chirp spread spectrum technique. By using chirp signal as a secret key, the message can be transmitted as a noise signal such that intruder cannot retrieve the message which is transmitted, and the message can be retrieve at the receiver side only with the help of secret key. Hence it provides high security with a low power and less complexity and it is very difficult to detect and intercept, hence it is used for the application of military and wireless communication to provide a covert communication. There are plenty of software based audio watermarking implementation are available, to our knowledge, we are the first authors to propose the hardware implementation of audio watermarking.