Statistical amplitude scale estimation for quantization-based watermarking

Quantization-based watermarking schemes are vulnerable to amplitude scaling. Therefore the scaling factor has to be accounted for either at the encoder, or at the decoder, prior to watermark decoding. In this paper we derive the marginal probability density model for the watermarked and attacked data, when the attack channel consists of amplitude scaling followed by additive noise. The encoder is Quantization Index Modulation with Distortion Compensation. Based on this model we obtain two estimation procedures for the scale parameter. The first approach is based on Fourier Analysis of the probability density function. The estimation of the scaling parameter relies on the structure of the received data. The second approach that we obtain is the Maximum Likelihood estimator of the scaling factor. We study the performance of the estimation procedures theoretically and experimentally with real audio signals, and compare them to other well known approaches for amplitude scale estimation in the literature.