Author(s)

Yasunari Yoshitomi, Taro Asada, Yohei Kinugawa, Masayoshi Tabuse

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Recently, several digital watermarking techniques have been proposed for hiding data in the frequency domain of audio files in order to protect their copyrights. In general, there is a tradeoff between the quality of watermarked audio and the tolerance of watermarks to signal processing methods, such as compression. In previous research, we simultaneously improved the performance of both by developing a multipurpose optimization problem for deciding the positions of watermarks in the frequency domain of audio data and obtaining a near-optimum solution to the problem. This solution was obtained using a wavelet transform and a genetic algorithm. However, obtaining the near-optimum solution was very time consuming. To overcome this issue essentially, we have developed an authentication method for digital audio using a discrete wavelet transform. In contrast to digital watermarking, no additional information is inserted into the original audio by the proposed method, and the audio is authenticated using features extracted by the wavelet transform and characteristic coding in the proposed method. Accordingly, one can always use copyright-protected original audio. The experimental results show that the method has high tolerance of authentication to all types of MP3, AAC, and WMA compression. In addition, the processing time of the method is acceptable for every-day use.

Authentication, Audio, Copyright Protection, Tolerance to Compression, Wavelet Transforms

Y. Yoshitomi, T. Asada, Y. Kinugawa and M. Tabuse, "An Authentication Method for Digital Audio Using a Discrete Wavelet Transform," Journal of Information Security, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2011, pp. 59-68. doi: 10.4236/jis.2011.22006.