Centroid-based semi-fragile audio watermarking in hybrid domain

Many previous (semi-) fragile audio watermarking schemes adopt binary images as watermarks, which reduce the security of watermarking systems. On the other hand, the content-based or feature-based second generation digital watermarking has limited applicability, and its partial feature points may be damaged by watermarking operations and various common signal processing. To overcome these problems, in this paper, a novel centroid-based semi-fragile audio watermarking scheme in hybrid domain is proposed. The theoretical lower limit of signal to noise ratio (SNR) for objective evaluation of the imperceptibility of watermarked audio signal is deduced, and the watermark embedding capacity and the tamper detection ability are theoretically analyzed. In the proposed scheme, first, the centroid of each audio frame is computed, then Hash function is performed on the obtained centroid to get the watermark, after that, the audio sub-band which carries centroid of audio frame is performed with discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT), and finally the encrypted watermark bits are embedded into the hybrid domain. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed scheme is inaudible and applicable to different types of audio signals. Furthermore, its ability of tamper detection and tolerance against common signal processing operations are excellent. Comparing with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme can effectively authenticate the veracity and integrity of audio content, and greatly expand the applicability of the content-based audio watermarking scheme.