The effect of polarity inversion of speech on human perception and data hiding as an application

In this paper we investigate how polarity inversion of speech signals effects human perception, and we apply this technique for data hiding. In most languages, glottal airflow during phonation is uni-directional, causing constant polarity of the speech waveform. On the other hand, the human auditory system cannot discriminate between speech signals with positive and negative polarity. Based on these facts, we developed an algorithm to hide data in speech signals. We assigned one bit to each syllable of speech, and inverted the polarity of the signal at every syllable according to the assigned bit. We performed a test using 20 sentences from the TIMIT corpus to determine both whether a human could distinguish between the original and polarity-inverted signal and whether we could automatically restore the embedded binary data. We found that we were able to successfully hide data and restore it automatically.