Synchronization is still one of the most important issues in digital watermarking. Many attacks do not remove the watermark from the cover, but only disable the synchronization between the watermark and the detector. Most watermarking algorithms feature some synchronization strategy, but especially in audio watermarking this may not be sufficient to fight de-synchronization attacks: As the watermark is embedded over a given length of audio data, a good synchronization at the starting point of the retrieval process may be lost during retrieval. An example for this is time stretching, where the effects of playback speed modification sums up during retrieval. We introduce a novel synchronization approach applying passive audio fingerprinting to synchronize each watermarking bit individually. Storage of the fingerprint values is not necessary in our approach, improving the usability compared to existing solutions in this area.

Date Published: 27 February 2007
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6505, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, 650509 (27 February 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.703311

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6505:
Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX
Edward J. Delp III; Ping Wah Wong, Editor(s)