Digital Audio and Speech Watermarking Based on the Multiple Discrete Wavelets Transform and Singular Value Decomposition

The ever-increasing illegal manipulation of genuine audio products has been a dilemma for the music industry. This situation calls for immediate, yet effective, solutions to avoid further financial losses and intellectual property violations. Audio and speech watermarking has been proposed as a possible solution, since this technology embeds copyright information into audio files as a proof of their ownership. In this paper, we propose an effective, robust, and an inaudible audio and speech watermarking algorithm. The effectiveness of the algorithm has been brought by virtue of applying a cascade of two powerful mathematical transforms; the discrete wavelets transform (DWT) and the singular value decomposition (SVD). Experimental results will be presented in this paper to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

I. Introduction

Recent unauthorized copying and distribution of digital audio has been greatly facilitated by the availability of powerful personal computers, low-cost and reliable storage devices, broadband communication networks, and many audio recording and editing software. This alarming situation has created a need for the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights for digital media, to prevent its illegal copying and reproduction. Such an urgent need is particularly relevant to the music industry, which is seeking for reliable solutions to problems associated with copyright protection of music files.