An audio watermarking scheme based on an embedding strategy with maximized robustness to perturbations

A particular application of audio watermarking systems consists in using the audio signal as a transmission channel for binary information. In this context, reliability criteria with respect to transmission rate, such as bit error rate (BER), is a major issue that defines system performance. Current research has already proven the advantage of using informed embedding rather than blind embedding. In this paper, we present a new informed watermarking system based on an embedding strategy that maximizes robustness to perturbations such as compression and analog transmission. The proposed system performance is then compared to the equivalent blind embedding system performance. Experimental results permit us to assess the achieved efficiency. For transmission rates, up to 500 bits/s, BER are divided by 10 when channel perturbation is compression and divided by 4 in the case of analog transmission.