A Phase-Based Audio Watermarking System Robust to Acoustic Path Propagation

Today, comparing audio watermarking systems remain a challenge due to the lack of publicly-available reference algorithms. In addition, robustness against acoustic path transmission is only occasionally evaluated. This jeopardizes the chances of digital watermarking to be adopted in the context of applications where such a feature is vital, e.g., second screen, audience measurement, and so on. In this paper, we introduce a rather simple audio watermarking algorithm, whose source code has been publicized for potential reuse by the watermarking community. We then complement this baseline system with three additional components, namely a psychoacoustic model, a resynchronization framework, and an improved correlation-based detector. Reported experimental results clearly demonstrate that the resulting high-fidelity audio watermarking system manages to survive the acoustic path.