Piracy Resisting Watermarking Audio Stream with improved DCT and DWT

Abstract: In this paper we studied With the exponential rise in digital audio streaming, protecting intellectual property from unauthorized use and piracy has become a critical challenge. This thesis presents a robust and imperceptible audio watermarking system designed to resist piracy through an improved hybrid technique that combines Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). The proposed method leverages the multi-resolution analysis capability of DWT and the energy compaction property of DCT to embed a secure, imperceptible watermark into the audio signal. The watermark is embedded in the mid-frequency coefficients of selected DWT sub-bands after DCT transformation, ensuring a balance between robustness and audio quality. A pseudo-random sequence, generated using a secret key, determines the watermark’s location, enhancing security against common signal processing and malicious attacks. The system is tested under various attack scenarios, including compression, filtering, noise addition, and re-sampling, to evaluate its robustness.

Keywords: DCT, DWT, SVD, ICA, Resampling.