An audio watermarking scheme using singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization

Quantization index modulation is one of the best methods for performing blind watermarking, due to its simplicity and good rate-distortion-robustness trade-offs. In this paper, a new audio watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition and dither-modulation quantization is presented. The watermark is embedded using dither-modulation quantization of the singular values of the blocks of the host audio signal. The watermark can be blindly extracted without the knowledge of the original audio signal. Subjective and objective tests confirm high imperceptibility achieved by the proposed scheme. Moreover, the scheme is quite robust against attacks including additive white Gaussian noise, MP3 compression, resampling, low-pass filtering, requantization, cropping, echo addition and denoising. The watermark data payload of the algorithm is 196 bps. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme shows low error probability rates.