Abstract
The digital media shared over the Internet is the backbone of the current generation of communication. Multimedia is becoming increasingly popular with no governing body for intellectual property rights, hence the need for protecting it efficiently while preserving the feature set of given data. Several watermarking methods have been proposed for the copyright protection of audio and speech signals yet the Recording Industry Association of America reported illegal downloading costs around $12.5 billion in the year 2021. Furthermore, the challenge to find the right balance between the three contrasting characteristics of watermarking; robustness, imperceptibility, and payload persists. This paper puts forward a new, hybrid, and purely data-driven way of watermarking the audio and speech signals using iterative filtering and singular value decomposition. The input audio is processed using iterative filtering to generate a band of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residue component. Depending upon the application, singular value decomposition is applied on residue or an IMF for insertion of bits of the watermark to minimize the effect of watermarking on the audio signal. The method focuses on the robustness of the audio signals against various signal processing attacks while providing a significant boost in imperceptibility and payload as well. Thus, providing a strikingly excellent balance between the characteristics of watermarking. With an average SNR of 38.06 db and normalized correlation close to unity, the proposed method validates its superiority compared to the state of the art.









Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The data cannot be made available as the authors are not permitted to do so as per the institution’s policy.
References
A.F. Abdelnour, I.W. Selesnick, Design of 2-band orthogonal near-symmetric CQF, in 2001 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings (Cat. No.01CH37221) (2001).
K.M. Abdelwahab, S.M. Abd El-atty, W. El-Shafai, S. El-Rabaie, F.E. Abd El-Samie, Efficient SVD-based audio watermarking technique in FRT domain. Multimed. Tools Appl. 79(9), 5617–5648 (2019)
P. Ayubi, S. Setayeshi, A.M. Rahmani, Deterministic Chaos Game: a new fractal based pseudo-random number generator and its cryptographic application. J. Inf. Secur. Appl. 52, 102472 (2020)
S. Bagheri Baba Ahmadi, G. Zhang, S. Wei, L. Boukela, An intelligent and blind image watermarking scheme based on hybrid SVD transforms using human visual system characteristics. Vis. Comput. 37(2), 385–409 (2020)
K.V. Bhat, I. Sengupta, A. Das, An audio watermarking scheme using singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization. Multimed. Tools Appl. 52(2–3), 369–383 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0515-1
M. Charfeddine, E. Mezghani, S. Masmoudi, C.B. Amar, H. Alhumyani, Audio watermarking for security and non-security applications. IEEE Access 10, 12654–12677 (2022)
A. Cicone, Iterative filtering as a direct method for the decomposition of nonstationary signals. Numer. Algorithms 85(3), 811–827 (2020)
F. Golshan, K. Mohammadi, A hybrid intelligent SVD-based perceptual shaping of a digital image watermark in DCT and DWT domain. Imaging Sci. J. 61(1), 35–46 (2013)
M. Jafari Barani, P. Ayubi, M. Yousefi Valandar, B.Y. Irani, A new pseudo random number generator based on generalized Newton Complex Map with dynamic key. J. Inf. Secur. Appl. 53, 102509 (2020)
H. Karajeh, M. Maqableh, An imperceptible, robust, and high payload capacity audio watermarking scheme based on the DCT transformation and Schur decomposition. Analog Integr. Circuits Signal Process. 99(3), 571–583 (2018)
A. Khaldi, A lossless blind image data hiding scheme for semi-fragile image watermark. Int. J. Comput. Vis. Robotics 10(5), 373 (2020)
O.-J. Kwon, S. Choi, B. Lee, A watermark-based scheme for authenticating JPEG image integrity. IEEE Access 6, 46194–46205 (2018)
W.-H. Lai, T.-Y. Chou, M.-C. Chou, B.W. Schuller, Robust Audio Watermarking based on empirical mode decomposition and group differential relations. J. Audio Eng. Soc. 71(3), 100–117 (2023)
Y.S. Lee, Y.H. Seo, D.W. Kim, Blind image watermarking based on adaptive data spreading in n-Level DWT sub-bands. Secur. Commun. Netw. 2019, 8357251 (2019)
B. Lei, I. Yann Soon, F. Zhou, Z. Li, H. Lei, A robust audio watermarking scheme based on lifting wavelet transform and singular value decomposition. Signal Process. 92(9), 1985–2001 (2012)
L. Lin, Y. Wang, H. Zhou, Iterative filtering as an alternative algorithm for empirical mode decomposition. Adv. Adapt. Data Anal. 01(04), 543–560 (2009)
Poonam, S.M. Arora, A DWT-SVD based robust digital watermarking for digital images. Procedia Comput. Sci. 132, 1441–1448 (2018)
S.M. Pourhashemi, M. Mosleh, Y. Erfani, Audio Watermarking based on synergy between Lucas regular sequence and fast Fourier transform. Multimed. Tools Appl. 78(16), 22883–22908 (2019)
S. Saadi, A. Merrad, A. Benziane, Novel secured scheme for blind audio/speech norm-space watermarking by Arnold algorithm. Signal Process. 154, 74–86 (2019)
E. Salah, K. Amine, K. Redouane, K. Fares, A Fourier transform based audio watermarking algorithm. Appl. Acoust. 172, 107652 (2021)
D.G. Savakar, A. Ghuil, Robust invisible digital image watermarking using hybrid scheme. Arab. J. Sci. Eng. 44(4), 3995–4008 (2019)
P. Singh, P.K. Srivastava, R.K. Patney, S.D. Joshi, K. Saha, Nonpolynomial spline based empirical mode decomposition, in 2013 International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICSC) (2013).
X. Wang, P. Wang, P. Zhang, S. Xu, H. Yang, A norm-space, adaptive, and Blind Audio Watermarking algorithm by discrete wavelet transform. Signal Process. 93(4), 913–922 (2013)
X. Wen, X. Ding, J. Li, L. Gao, H. Sun, An audio watermarking algorithm based on Fast Fourier transform, in 2009 International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering (2009).
W. Wu, A novel SVD and LWT based robust blind audio watermarking scheme. Int. J. Netw. Secur. 21(5), 751–759 (2019)
L. Xie, J. Zhang, H. He, Robust audio watermarking scheme based on nonuniform discrete Fourier transform, in 2006 IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Intelligent Systems (2006), pp. 1–5
M. Yamni, H. Karmouni, M. Sayyouri, H. Qjidaa, Robust audio watermarking scheme based on fractional Charlier moment transform and dual tree complex wavelet transform. Expert Syst. Appl. 203, 117325 (2022)
Y. Yan, H. Rong, X. Mintao, A novel audio watermarking algorithm for copyright protection based on DCT domain. in 2009 Second International Symposium on Electronic Commerce and Security (2009).
Acknowledgements
The authors from India would like to express their gratitude to the DST, the government of India, for their assistance in this research under the scheme SHRI with Grant Number DST/TDT/SHRI-33/2018.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors report no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Naqash, K.I., Malik, S.A. & Parah, S.A. Robust Audio Watermarking Based on Iterative Filtering. Circuits Syst Signal Process 43, 348–367 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-023-02475-3
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-023-02475-3