An Acoustic Communication Technique Based on Audio Data Hiding Utilizing Artificial Flowing Water Sounds

Data hiding can be utilized as a communication medium as well as digital watermarking or fingerprinting ap-plications which can protect intellectual property rights or avoid illegal copying of digital media. In the previous studies, audio data hiding techniques have been applied to disaster prevention broadcasting systems and a technique called Tone Code that can embed the secret messages by utilizing the characteristics of mu-sical pieces, such as melody, harmony and rhythm. In this study, an audio data hiding scheme utilizing artificial flowing water sounds is proposed and applied it into an acoustic communication technique in a small chamber such as a restroom stall. Such flowing water sounds have characteristics quite similar to white Gaussian noise. Therefore, it is expected that the deterioration of the stego sound quality can be ignored after embedding secret messages in those sounds. It is shown that the proposed scheme can transmit the secret messages with almost no errors through the experiments under the analog transmission scenario using loud speakers and mobile terminals in a small chamber. Some problems to be tackled in our future study are also discussed.