Audio watermarking using m-sequences and temporal masking

A novel algorithm for embedding a spread-spectrum based watermark into uncompressed, raw audio sequences is presented. The scheme takes advantage of temporal masking phenomenon in the human auditory system (HAS) in order to embed watermark data below the masking threshold of the audio signal. Detection of the watermark is done by blind detection, without using the original audio. As watermarking embedding and extraction are performed in the temporal domain, transformations to and from the frequency domain are not performed, neither on the embedding nor extraction part of the proposed scheme, resulting in the calculation simplicity of the embedding and detection process. The algorithm proved to be robust against mp3 compression (resulting in a BER of about 1.7%) and other common signal processing attacks, while the embedded watermark introduces no audible distortion of the host audio signal.