Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

SNR Based Audio Watermarking In Wavelet Domain

Mrs. M.R. Patil1, Dr. S. D. Apte2, Mr. M.B. Bhilavade3 and Mr. A.B. Patil4
1
Assistant Professor E&CE Dept, Dr.J.J.M.C.O.E. Jasingpur, Maharashtra
2
Professor E&TC Dept, R. S. C.O.E. Pune, Maharashtra
3
Lecturer ElectricalDept, Dr.J.J.M.C.O.E. Jasingpur, Maharashtra
4
Assistant Professor Electrical Dept, W.C.E. Sangli, Maharashtra

Abstract

Audio Watermarking method developed and analyzed in this paper embeds the
watermark data in the wavelet domain. To embed the watermark the additive
watermark embedding approach is used in which scaling parameter is computed
based on the SNR(Signal to noise ratio). The developed technique is tested
against different signal manipulation technique such as filtering, resampling,
noise addition, compression, echo addition and equalization. It is observed that
the technique is resilient against signal manipulation attacks. The results are
compared with the present techniques and observed that the SNR based
watermarking techniques improves the SNR of marked signal as well as the
BER(bit error rate) of recovered watermark.

1. INTRODUCTION
The tremendous development of digital technology and increasing demand of internet
technology offers a challenge to both illegal and unauthorized data manipulation.
Traditionally cryptography is used for data authentication and confidentiality. However
it does not protect against unauthorized media duplication. Digital watermarking
technology is proposed by the researchers to solve this problem. Digital watermarking
for DVD video, DVD audio is currently a hot research area.
Digital watermarking is a process which embeds a discrete data in to digital media
and remains present after all kinds of manipulations. Discrete data can be company logo
or authors identification. Digital watermarking is characterized in to two broad classes
fragile and robust. Fragile watermarking is one that can not survive against different
kinds of modifications on watermarked data. A robust watermark, on the other hand
remains present after all kinds of modifications. Fragile watermarks are used for media
authentication and tamper proofing. Robust watermarks are used for digital rights
management. Semi fragile watermarks can also be used for media authentication and
recovery [1].
The watermarking algorithms were primarily developed for digital images and video
sequences interest and research in audio watermarking started later. In past few years,
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

several algorithms for embedding and extraction of watermarks in audio have been
presented. All of the developed algorithms [1-12] take advantage of the perceptual
properties of human auditory system (HAS) in order to add a watermark into a host
signal. Embedding additional information into audio signal is a more tedious task than
that of images. In addition the amount of data that can be embedded in audio signal is
less than that of two-dimensional video files. On other hand many attacks that are
malicious against image watermarking algorithm cannot be implemented against audio
watermarking schemes [2].
The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follow. An idea about the 1-D
wavelet decomposition is given in section II. The idea of the proposed technique is
described in section III. Section IV discusses the experimental results. Finally Section V
concludes the paper.

2.1-D WAVELET DECOMPOSITION

The wavelet transform is identical to a hierarchical sub band system, where the sub
bands are logarithmically spaced in frequency domain. The basic idea of the DWT for a
one dimensional signal is described as follows. A signal s is first decomposed into

S S

Ca Cd Ca Cd

Ca Cd Ca Cd

Ca Cd Ca Cd
(a) (b)
Fig 2.1. A discrete wavelet tree for a three level decomposition a) Decomposition b)
Reconstruction.

two parts approximation coefficients vector (Ca1) and detail coefficients vector (Cd1).
To obtain the next coarser scaled wavelet coefficients, the approximation coefficients
vector Ca1 is further decomposed. This process is repeated several times, according to
the application in use. An example of a three level decomposition of a signal S is shown
in Fig.2.1.a. The reconstruction process of the signal S from these coefficients is called
inverse DWT (IDWT) and is shown in fig 2.1.b.

3 SNR BASED WATERMARKING IN WAVELET DOMAIN

This section describes the watermarking technique based on SNR. The goal of the
watermarking technique is to embed (add) the cover signal(watermark) in to the host
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

multimedia signal. The embedding process modifies the host signal by mixing function.
In most of the watermarking technique mixing function is the addition of original host
signal and scaled cover signal. Mathematically the function is defined as

Y(n) = x(n) + αw(n) (3.1)

Where Y(n) is the watermarked signal, x(n) is the original host signal, w(n) the cover
signal and α scaling parameter used as the secret key. The value of α plays an
important role in embedding as well as in detection process. In embedding process α is
selected in such way that the cover information is imperceptible (inaudible). The
watermark detection process is exactly the reverse process. Without the knowledge of
parameter α it is not possible to detect the watermark. Any statistical analysis should not
leave any possibility of detecting the cover signal or the parameter α. The
imperceptibility of the watermarking procedure is computed by computing the SNR
between the original host signal and the watermarked signal. The SNR can be computed
as

Σ x2(i)
i
SNR = 10 log (3.2)
Σ(x(i) – Y (i)) 2
i

From formulas 3.1 and 3.2 the scaling parameter α can be computed as

α = √(Σ x2(i)) 10(-SNR/10)/w(i) (3.3)

i

1.1. Watermark Embedding.

For the threshold value of SNR the scaling parameter required in formula 3.1 is
computed and used to embed the watermark. The imperceptible audio watermark
scheme requires at least 30 db SNR values, so the threshold value of SNR should be
considered as 30 for solving the formula 3.3.
The human auditory system is insensible to the small variations in the amplitude of
host audio signal either in the time domain or in the transform domain [5]. Audio
watermarking techniques take the advantage of this imperfection of HAS. The adaptive
audio watermarking scheme developed in[6] compute the value of scaling parameter α
required in formula 3.1 for every subsection of host audio signal where as the scheme
developed here compute only one value of α for the host audio signal using formula 3.3.
The watermark embedding process is shown in fig 3.1. The host audio signal x(n) is
divided into subsections of size N=2k, each subsection is decomposed into 3-level
Discrete wavelet transform by means of harr wavelet transform. Most of the
watermarking techniques developed in wavelet domain are implemented using harr
wavelet because harr wavelet is perfectly invertible. The detailed coefficients (cd3) of
host audio signal are selected for embedding the watermark.
The M1× M2 binary image is considered as a watermark. Before embedding this 2-D
watermark into host audio it is converted into its 1-D bipolar equivalent {1,-1} w(n).
The w(n) is scaled by the parameter α (r(n) = α*w(n)) where α= α’*s 1 (s1 Secret key kept
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

confidential) and one bit of r(n) is embedded into a single subsection of host audio
signal.

To find the imperceptibility of the system SNR between the host audio signal and
watermarked signal is computed by the formula 3.2. It is observed that the SNR of this
technique is 43.77 db. The watermarked signal and host audio signal is played in front
of the five personalities having the knowledge of music. There is no perceptual
difference between the host audio signal and the watermarked audio signal. The
watermarked signal is passed through different signal processing techniques and
observed that the technique is resilient against such signal processing techniques. The
results of attacks against signal processing techniques is included in the section III.

Binary x(n)
Image

Bipolar Computation of
Conversion α

2-D to 1-D Subsection

conversion x(n) with
size=2k

Scaling
DWT DWT DWT DWT

Watermark Watermark Watermark Watermark

embedding embedding embedding embedding

IDWT IDWT IDWT IDWT

Concatenation

Y(n)
Fig.3.1. Watermark Embedding Process.

1.2. Watermark detection.

 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

In order to proceed to detect the watermark the knowledge of scaling parameter α is

very important without the knowledge of α it is not possible to detect the watermark.
Scaling parameter α’ is computed during the watermark embedding process using the
formula 3.3. After computing this parameter it is further scaled by secret key and used
as a key (α) to embed the watermark. The original signal x(n) is required to recover the
watermark. The formula required to detect the watermark is exactly the reverse of
formula 3.1. The procedure required to detect the watermark is shown in fig 3.2.
To detect the watermark the x(n) and y(n) are divided into subsections of size N
where N =2k . Where the value of k is same as used during the watermark embedding
process. Each subsection is decomposed using 3-level wavelet transform. The
watermark is then recovered as shown in fig.3.2.

x(n) Y(n)

Subsection Subsection
x(n) with x(n) with
size=2k size=2k

DWT
DWT

α Watermark detection

Recovery of bipolar watermark

by threshold comparison.

1-D to 2-D conversion

Binary image
Fig.3.2 Watermark detection.

After detecting the presence of watermark each value is compared against the
threshold value T to recover the bipolar watermark. If the value of the sample is greater
than the threshold then watermark bit is recovered as 1 otherwise if value of sample is
less than threshold the watermark bit is recovered as -1.The recovered watermark is 1-D
signal so it is converted into the required 2-d form of size M 1× M2 to recover the binary
image used as watermark. In order to test the similarity between the recovered
watermark and the original watermark the correlation coefficient between original
watermark and recovered watermark is computed.
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
This section highlights on the experimental results obtained during the
implementation of the scheme. The original host audio signal and the watermarked
audio signal is shown in fig 4.1. Fig 4.1.a represents the original host audio signal and
the fig 4.1.b. represents the watermarked signal. It can be observed that there is no
perceptual difference between the two. The two audio signals are played in front of the
five personalities to test the audible difference between them and found that there is no
audible difference between the original host audio signal and the watermarked signal.
The SNR is computed by using formula 3.2 and is 43.77 db. The fig 4.2 shows the
original watermark and the extracted watermark. Fig 4.2.a represents the original
watermark and the fig 4.2.b represents the extracted watermark. To find the similarity
between the original watermark and the recovered watermark the correlation coefficient
is computed and is 0.9917.

Fig 4.1. a) Original host audio signal b) Watermarked audio signal.

a) b)
Fig 4.2 a) Original Watermark b) Recovered watermark.

4.1. Result Analysis against Attacks.

To test the robustness of the technique the watermarked audio signal is passed
through different signal processing techniques. The experimental results show that the
SNR between the original signal and processed watermarked signal is above 25db in all
cases. The watermark is successfully recovered after all processing and the correlation
coefficient is also above the 0.88.
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

• Low pass filtering

The signal is passed through the low pass filter with cutoff frequency 11025 Hz. The
results of the signal processing attacks are shown in table 1.The extracted watermark
have little distortion and the correlation coefficient is equal to 0.9917.
• Resampling
The watermarked audio signal with original sampling rate 44100Hz has been down
sampled to 22050Hz and upsampled back to 44100Hz. The correlation coefficient of the
recovered watermark after down sampling is 0.9878. The observed SNR is 28.56db.
When the watermarked signal is upsampled with sampling rate equal to 88200 Hz and
downsampled back to 44100 Hz then correlation coefficient is equal to 0.9910 and SNR
equal to 34.26db.
• MP3 Compression
The watermarked audio signal is mp3 compressed at 64 kbps and is observed that the
watermark resist the mp3 compression. The observed correlation coefficient is 0.9945
and SNR is 41.27db.
• Requantization
The 8-bit watermarked signal is requantized to 16bit/sample and back to 8 bit/sample.
The correlation coefficient after requantization is 0.9910 and SNR is 39db.
• Cropping
10%signal of each segment of the watermarked signal is cropped and watermark is
recovered from it. The obtained correlation coefficient is 0.9884 and SNR is 37.29db.
• Noise addition
White noise with 15 of the power audio signal is added into the watermarked audio
signal. Correlation coefficient of recovered watermark after noise addition in
watermarked signal is 0.9879 7 SNR is 34.26db.

Table 1 Experimental Results Against Signal Processing Attacks

Sr. Improved SNR Adaptive SNR
No. based scheme based scheme[6]
Attack SNR ρ SNR ρ
1 Down 28.56 0.9886 21.16 0.9256
Sampling
2 Up Sampling 34.26 0.9916 32.29 0.9940
3 LP-filtering 19.73 0.9917 16.11 0.9981
4 Requantization 39 0.9910 NA NA
5 Cropping 37.29 0.9884 NA NA
6 Mp3 41.25 0.9945 NA NA
compression
7 Noise addition 34.26 0.9879 17.42 0.9874

The experimental results of the developed scheme and the scheme developed in [6]
are shown in table 1. The SNR between the watermarked signal and the original host
audio signal is computed and entered in the 2 nd column of the table. Correlation
coefficient between the original watermark and the recovered watermark is entered in
the 3rd column of the table. The entries in 4th and 5th column represents the results of the
scheme developed in [6], these entries are obtained from the literature.
 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cognition and Recognition

The experimental results show that the developed technique recovers the watermark
successfully after all kinds of signal processing attacks mentioned in the table. It is
observed that the SNR between the original signal and the distorted signal is within the
acceptable limit of 30db and above except for the LP-filtering and down sampling.

5 . CONCLUSION
Audio watermarking scheme presented in this paper is robust against the signal
processing attacks. The experimental results presented in section IV represent that the
results of the improved techniques are better than the scheme in [6]. The watermarking
technique in [6] was not able to recover the watermark after LP filtering, mp3
compression and noise addition. Where as the scheme presented here is successful in
recovering the watermark after all kinds of attacks. The SNR based watermarking
schemes require the original audio signal to recover the watermark. Future work of the
research will concentrate on developing the blind detection scheme [8] which does not
require the original signal to recover the watermark.

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