High capacity audio data hiding for noisy channels

Abstract

We combine theoretical and algorithmic advances in the area of information-hiding with the current mature knowledge-base in the human audio perception system to propose a novel audio data hiding technique that significantly pushes the state-of-the-art in the field. Our work is based on a combination of advances in two disjoint fields: information hiding and human auditory masking. The field of information hiding has seen a resurgence due to advances in the understanding of fundamental bounds from information theory. By integrating this with the human perceptual system knowledge that has been successfully exploited for several years in the audio compression community, we derive a new and improved audio data hiding technique that finds application in a number of exciting scenarios like music enhancement and digital communications over analog data channels. Our preliminary results show that we can embed data at an order of magnitude higher rate than existing audio data hiding systems, while being robust to channel noise.