Audio watermarking based on empirical mode decomposition and beat detection

In the recent years a large number of methods have been proposed in order to reliably embed information into audio files. Despite their increased robustness against attacks, they tend to have a lot of redundancy due to a large number of bits used for majority voting due to disability to correctly select regions that are unlikely to be distorted by attacks. To overcome this, we propose a robust method for audio watermarking where Empirical Mode Decomposition and beat detection are used for detecting the locations for embedding the watermark. In order to find the embedding locations, we use a simplified psychoacoustic model to split the input into audible frequency bands and two phase comb filtering on those bands to find the beat metrical structure. Then, at each embedding location, we take several frames and decompose them into Intrinsic Mode Functions. In an extensive test, we show promising results on a selection of songs spanning over three musical genres.