Performance evaluation of digital audio watermarking techniques designed in time, frequency and cepstrum domains

This study investigates the performances of a variety of audio watermarking techniques designed in time, frequency and cepstrum domains. A framework of comparison is performed with respect to bit error rate (BER), objective and subjective perceptual quality, computational complexity and robustness to signal processing such as low-pass filtering, requantization and MPEG Layer 3 (MP3) compression. It is observed that the cepstrum domain technique is superior to other techniques in terms of almost all criteria. Additionally, a new watermark embedding technique is introduced that combines frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) and frequency masking (FM) techniques. It is experimentally concluded that the proposed technique performs fairly well and is robust to MP3 compression.