A semi-fragile watermarking scheme for authenticating audio signal based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform and discrete cosine transform

In this paper, a novel semi-fragile watermarking scheme for authenticating an audio signal based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) is proposed. Specifically, the watermark data are efficiently inserted into the coefficients of the low-frequency sub-band of DT-CWT taking advantages of both DCT and quantization index modulation (QIM). First, the original digital audio signal is segmented and then performed with DT-CWT. Second, based on the energy compression property, the low-frequency sub-band coefficients of the DT-CWT domain are performed with DCT, and the DC component is utilized to embed one distorted watermark bit by the QIM technique. Finally, inverse DCT and DT-CWT are orderly implemented on the watermarked coefficients of each audio segment to get a watermarked audio signal. Simulation results show that the hybrid embedding domain constructed by DT-CWT and DCT is effective, and the proposed watermarking scheme is not only inaudible, but also robust against content persistent non-malicious audio signal processing operations, such as MP3 compression, noise addition, re-sampling, re-quantization, etc. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can effectively authenticate the veracity and integrity of audio content and greatly expands the applicability of the audio watermarking scheme.