Audio Watermarking over the Air with Modulated Self-correlation

Abstract

We propose a novel audio watermarking system that is robust to the distortion due to the indoor acoustic propagation channel between the loudspeaker and the receiving microphone. The system utilizes a set of new algorithms that effectively mitigate the impact of room reverberation and interfering sound sources without using derever- beration procedures. The decoder has low-latency and it operates asynchronously, which alleviates the need for explicit synchroniza- tion with the encoder. It is also robust to standard audio processing operations in legacy watermarking systems, e.g., compression and volume change. The effectiveness of the system is established with a real-time system under general room conditions.