Enhanced spread spectrum watermarking of MPEG-2 AAC audio

A novel AAC watermarking scheme with low structural and computational complexity is proposed to achieve real-time AAC audio watermark embedding capability. In this scheme, an enhanced spread spectrum watermarking method that increases the robustness and information hiding capacity of the watermarking channel is developed and employed. Furthermore, this scheme improves the speed of the encoding process in that we directly use the quantized indices rather than the dequantized coefficients, thus no explicit dequantization and requantization are performed. Our embedded watermark is tested to be robust against AAC/MP3 transcoding at a rate of 10 bps. The scheme is suitable for speedy encoding and decoding of watermark with low cost hardware.