Decode-Time Forensic Watermarking of AAC Bitstreams

In digital rights-management systems, forensic watermarking complements encryption and deters the capture and unauthorized redistribution of the rendered content. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking method which is integrated into the advanced audio coding (AAC) standard´s decoding process. For predefined frequency bands, the method intercepts and modifies the scale factors, which are utilized for dequantization of spectral coefficients. It thereby modulates the short-time envelope of the bandlimited audio and embeds a watermark which is robust to various attacks, such as capture with a microphone and recompression at lower bit rates. Inclusion of watermark embedding in the AAC decoder has practically no effect on the decoding complexity. As a result, the proposed method can be integrated even into resource-constrained devices, such as portable players without any additional hardware.