Audio Watermarking Quality Evaluation: Robustness to DA/AD Processes

Audio watermarking has become an important technology for recording and advertisement industry. Today’s embedding and detection strategies often rely on digital or at least high quality channels, like CD or mp3. However for numerous applications, watermarks surviving noisy analogue environments are better suited or even necessary. Application of such schemes allows to identify audio signals with monitoring devices without being connected to the receiver. . In the same way illegal recordings of concerts can be identified. In this paper we describe a test environment for noisy DA/AD channels and present results obtained from different watermarking schemes. We identify changes in the effected audio material like frequency loss or the amount of noise added to the signal. In order to do automatic robustness evaluations of watermarking schemes the Stirmark Benchmark environment can be used. We analyze if it is possible to simulate a noisy DA/AD environment with filters, quantizsation and noise generators. Based on the presented test results, we identify the parameters relevant for watermarks successfully surviving DA/AD environments and thereby provide valuable hints for audio watermark designers. We also describe a design concept for a DA/AD simulation