Content Based Audio Watermarking and Retrieval Using Time-Frequency Analysis

This research focuses on the application of joint time-frequency (TF) analysis for watermarking and classifying different audio signals. Time frequency analysis which originated in the 1930s has often been used to model the non-stationary behaviour of speech and audio signals. By taking into consideration the human auditory system which has many non-linear effects and its masking properties, we can extract efficient features from the TF domain to watermark or classify signals. This novel audio watermarking scheme is based on spread spectrum techniques and uses content-based analysis to detect the instananeous mean frequency (IMF) of the input signal. The watermark is embedded in this perceptually significant region such that it will resist attacks. Audio watermarking offers a solution to data privacy and helps to protect the rights of the artists and copyright holders. Using the IMF, we aim to keep the watermark imperceptible while maximizing its robustness. In this case, 25 bits are embedded and recovered witin a 5 s sample of an audio signal. This scheme has shown to be robust against various signal processing attacks including filtering, MP3 compression, additive moise and resampling with a bit error rate in the range of 0-13%. In addition content-based classification is performed using TF analysis to classify sounds into 6 music groups consisting of rock, classical, folk, jazz and pop. The features that are extracted include entropy, centroid, centroid ratio, bandwidth, silence ratio, energy ratio, frequency location of minimum and maximum energy. Using a database of 143 signals, a set of 10 time-frequncy features are extracted and an accuracy of classification of around 93.0% using regular linear discriminant analysis or 92.3% using leave one out method is achieved.