Excerpts from the Abstract:

Broadband communication networks and multimedia data available in a digital format opened many challenges and opportunities for innovation. Versatile and simple-to-use software and decreasing prices of digital devices have made it possible for consumers from all around the world to create and exchange multimedia data. Broadband Internet connections and near error-free transmission of data facilitate people to distribute large multimedia files and make identical digital copies of them. A perfect reproduction in digital domain have promoted the protection of intellectual ownership and the prevention of unauthorized tampering of multimedia data to become an important technological and research issue.

Digital watermarking has been proposed as a new, alternative method to enforce intellectual property rights and protect digital media from tampering. Digital watermarking is defined as imperceptible, robust and secure communication of data related to the host signal, which includes embedding into and extraction from the host signal. The main challenge in digital audio watermarking and steganography is that if the perceptual transparency parameter is fixed, the design of a watermark system cannot obtain high robustness and a high watermark data rate at the same time. In this thesis, we address three research problems on audio watermarking: First, what is the highest watermark bit rate obtainable, under the perceptual transparency constraint, and how to approach the limit? Second, how can the detection performance of a watermarking system be improved using algorithms based on communications models for that system? Third, how can overall robustness to attacks to a watermark system be increased using attack characterization at the embedding side? An approach that combined theoretical consideration and experimental validation, including digital signal processing, psychoacoustic modeling and communications theory, is used in developing algorithms for audio watermarking and steganography.

The main results of this study are the development of novel audio watermarking algorithms, with the state-of-the-art performance and an acceptable increase in computational complexity. The algorithms' performance is validated in the presence of the standard watermarking attacks. The main technical solutions include algorithms for embedding high data rate watermarks into the host audio signal, using channel models derived from communications theory for watermark transmission and the detection and modeling of attacks using attack characterization procedure. The thesis also includes a thorough review of the state-of-the-art literature in the digital audio watermarking.