Audio Watermarking System Robust to Offset Distortion in Acoustic Channel Transmission

Audio watermarking is a technology for enriching multimedia services by hiding and delivering useful information in an audio signal. To extend its potential, audio watermarking has recently been applied to short-range communication between a speaker and microphone for easy accessibility to enriched data in a second portable device. Although many challengeable difficulties are expected to occur under such a scenario, the most important aspect is achieving robust synchronization by overcoming offset distortion in the time and frequency domains. In this paper, a polarized sequence-based audio watermarking system in the DFT domain is proposed. The main strength of this work is providing reliable synchronization that is robust to any distortion for time and frequency offset in an acoustic channel. Moreover, based on the results of an evaluation, performance aspects such as the synchronization under acoustic channel distortion, and preservation of the sound quality, were confirmed.