High-Performance Self-Synchronous Blind Audio Watermarking in a Unified FFT Framework

This paper presents a blind audio watermarking method that uses two different schemes to hide binary bits and auxiliary information within separate ranges of a fast Fourier transform (FFT) sequence. An adaptive vector norm modulation (AVNM) scheme is introduced to achieve a satisfactory balance of imperceptibility, robustness, and payload capacity. An improved spread spectrum (ISS) scheme is developed to produce a striking correlation peak, which facilitates the detection of synchronization codes in the FFT domain. The combination of robust audio segment extraction and recursive FFT makes it possible to execute these two FFT-based schemes in tandem on a sample-by-sample basis. The experiment results confirm that watermark embedding causes merely a negligible degradation in perceptual quality. A detectability test proved the effectiveness of the ISS scheme in self-synchronization as well as hiding auxiliary data. Three versions of AVNM with capacities ranging from 344.53 to 1033.59 bits per second were demonstrated. Compared with six recently developed schemes, AVNM exhibited advantages in terms of negligible quality distortion, flexible payload capacity, and excellent robustness against a variety of common signal processing attacks.