A Secure and Robust Audio Watermarking Scheme Using Secret Sharing in the Transform-Domain

Aliya Tabassum Abbasi, Fuyou Miao, Md. Shohidul Islam

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a secure and robust audio watermarking system by incorporating secret sharing in the transform domain. Previous audio watermarking schemes often overlooked important parameters such as imperceptibility, robustness, embedding capacity, and security. In particular, the security of the embedded watermark, a crucial aspect, was either confused with robustness or disregarded entirely. To overcome these challenges, our proposed scheme leverages permutation and secret sharing techniques to preprocess the watermark image, generating encrypted shares of the secret watermark. Transform coefficients are then derived using discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) on both the encrypted watermark shares and the audio covers. The watermark is invisibly embedded by aligning the diagonal coefficients of the audio cover with the watermark coefficients. Our audio watermarking scheme, Secret Sharing in transform-domain (SS-TD), is compared and evaluated against state-of-the-art audio watermarking techniques on audios of varying lengths and genres, concealing different length images Experimental results demonstrate the effective resistance of the proposed (SS-TD) system against various signal processing attacks; thereby increasing robustness, a reasonable imperceptibility with an average SNR of 24.2 by achieving high average embedding capacity of 3281.25 under different embedding strength (\(\alpha \)). Notably, security is analyzed by performing keyspace and various statistical analysis such as; histogram, adjacent pixel correlation and information entropy analysis. Experimental results also show that it performs better at restoring the distortion-free watermark.