Audio-watermarking based ownership verification system using enhanced DWT-SVD technique

Audio watermarking has been proposed as an effective solution to solve or mitigate the new challenges of audio ownership verification. These challenges arose from easiness of copying and distributing of audio applications. This paper proposes important performance enhancements to a previously-reported audio ownership verification system based upon utilizing a combination of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) techniques. A new audio signal framing, DWT matrix formation and embedding methods are proposed and successfully implemented to improve the minimum audio-cover period, quality of the watermarked audio and its robustness against various attacks. Performance evaluation of the developed system demonstrated improvements of 69% in the required minimum audio-cover period, 25% in the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and improved robustness against various watermarking benchmark attacks.