Audio Watermarking: Properties, Techniques and Evaluation

Abstract

The recent explosion of the Internet as a collaborative medium has opened the door for people who want to share their work. Nonetheless, the advantages of such an open medium can pose very serious problems for authors who do not want their works to be distributed without their consent. As new methods for copyright protection are devised, expectations around them are formed and sometimes improvable claims are made. This chapter covers one such technology: audio watermarking. First, the field is introduced, and its properties and applications are discussed. Then, the most common techniques for audio watermarking are reviewed, and the framework is set for the objective measurement of such techniques. The last part of the chapter proposes a novel test and a set of metrics for thorough benchmarking of audio watermarking schemes. The development of such a benchmark constitutes a first step towards the standardization of the requirements and properties that such systems should display.