Audio watermarking based on music content analysis: Robust against time scale modification

Synchronization attacks like random cropping and time scale modification are crucial to audio watermarking technique. To combat these attacks, a novel content-dependent temporally localized robust audio watermarking method is proposed in this paper. The basic idea is to embed and detect watermark in selected high energy local regions that represent music transition like drum sounds or note onsets. Such regions correspond to music edge and will not be changed much for the purpose of maintaining high auditory quality. In this way, the embedded watermark is expected to escape the damages caused by audio signal processing, random cropping and time scale modification etc, as shown by the experimental results.