| In recent times there has been an explosion in the use of digital media. Editing the content of digital signals has become easy, safe and economical. Thus, the intellectual rights of the owner are endangered. Audio watermarking is a promising approach to the copyright protection of digital audio. In digital audio watermarking, the goal is to embed some meaningful message information in the original audio signal without perceptual distortion in the quality of the audio signal. In this thesis, an audio watermarking technique was developed where a watermark was inserted in the periods of silence of an audio signal. Watermarking was accomplished by exploiting the properties of the Human Auditory System (HAS). Every audio signal has some periods of silence called the "Mute Periods". The watermark was inserted into the original sound signal by reducing the length of these mute periods without any perceptual difference to the quality of the signal. This new watermarking algorithm combines and adapts various aspects from the existing watermarking methods. The code was implemented in MATLAB 7.0.0.19920 RELEASE 14. The experimental results showed that the presented approach was robust to various signal processing and compression attacks. |
