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 dereverberation procedures. The decoder has low-latency and it operates asynchronously, which alleviates the need for explicit synchronization 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.