Patchwork-Based Audio Watermarking Robust Against De-Synchronization and Recapturing Attacks

Watermarking is a solution for copyright protection and forensics tracking, but recapturing and de-synchronization attacks may be used to effectively remove audio watermarks. Although much effort has been made in recent years, the robustness of audio watermarking against recapturing and de-synchronization attacks is still a challenging issue. Specifically, we first construct the frequency-domain coefficients logarithmic mean (FDLM) feature of digital audio. By theoretical analysis, we conclude that the residual of the two groups’ FDLM feature is robust against recapturing attack. We then propose a robust audio watermarking method based on this feature using the patchwork framework. Compared with the method having the best robustness performance against recapturing attack, the BER value of our method is decreased by 7%. Besides that, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art patchwork-based watermarking methods notably, under recapturing and post-processed with signal processing operations and de-synchronization attacks.