Digital Audio Watermarking Techniques for MP3 Audio Files

Abstract

In this chapter, we will present a brief overview of audio watermarking with the focus on a novel audio watermarking scheme which is based on watermarks with a “semantic” meaning and offers a method for mpeg audio layer 3 files which does not need the original watermark for proving copyright ownership of an audio file. This scheme operates directly in the compressed data domain, while manipulating the time and subband/channel domains and was implemented with the mind on efficiency, both in time and space. The main feature of this scheme is that it offers users the enhanced capability of proving their ownership of the audio file not by simply detecting the bit pattern that comprises the watermark itself, but by showing that the legal owner knows a hard to compute property of the watermark bit sequence (“semantic” meaning). Our discussion on the scheme is accompanied by experimental results.