An Effective Watermarking Method Based on Energy Averaging in Audio Signals

Methods based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) have been proposed for digital watermarking of audio signals; however, the watermark is often vulnerable to data compression and signal processing. This paper presents an effective audio watermarking method by energy averaging of DCT coefficients such that an audio signal with watermark is robust to data processing. The method is to divide an audio signal into segments by three parameters defining the segment length, the segment sequence of watermark location, and the frequency range of DCT coefficients for watermark location. An error correcting code is also integrated to improve audio signal quality after watermarking. Experimental results show that the method is robust to data compression and many other kinds of signal processing. No original signal is required for decoding the watermark. Comparison of watermarking performance with a recent work validates that the watermarking method has better audio quality and higher robustness.