A COMPARISON OF ECHO HIDING METHODS

Abstract

Echo-based data hiding algorithms are known to be verypopular in audio watermarking research. In this study, several echo kernelssuch as single, bipolar, backward-forward, bipolar backward-forward andtime-spread, which are coded in Matlab, are compared in terms of robustnessagainst mp3 compression, imperceptibility and capacity. Mixer signals withsinusoidal smoothing are used to improve imperceptibility. All kernels aretested on the same audio database for a fair comparison. Importance ofparameters is discussed during comparison. Results show that bipolarbackward-forward echo kernel is more robust against compression and gives ahigher SNR (Signal-to-noise ratio).