Incorporation of Perceptually Energy-Compensated QIM into DWT-DCT Based Blind Audio Watermarking

A scheme for energy compensation is proposed to remedy the deficiency of the DWT-DCT based scheme while applying the quantization index modulation (QIM) to perform blind audio watermarking. Our experimental results show that both the compensated and uncompensated DWT-DCT schemes can achieve satisfactory robustness and imperceptivity at a payload capacity as high as 516.80 bps. However, because of the exploitation of the auditory masking effect, the perceptual quality attained by the compensated DWT-DCT scheme is even higher than that by the uncompensated one. Moreover, with the employment of energy compensation, not only a 100% recovery of the watermark is guaranteed for non-attack situations but the survival rate is substantially improved in the case of extremely low pass filtering.