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Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Genetic Algorithm Optimization of


Multiwavelet-based Audio Watermarking
PRAYOTH KUMSAWAT1, KITTI ATTAKITMONGCOL2 AND ARTHIT SRIKAEW2
1
School of Telecommunication Engineering, 2School of Electrical Engineering
Institute of Engineering, Suranaree University of Technology
111 University Avenue, Muang District, Nakhon Ratchasima, 30000, Thailand
E-mail: {prayoth, kitti, ra}@sut.ac.th

Abstract:- In this paper, we propose a new approach for optimization in audio watermarking using artificial
intelligent technique. The watermarks are embedded into the low frequency coefficients in discrete
multiwavelet transform domain. The embedding technique is based on quantization process which does not
require the original audio signal in the watermark extraction. We have developed an optimization technique
using the genetic algorithm to search for optimal quantization step in order to improve both quality of
watermarked audio and robustness of the watermark. The experimental results show that our proposed
method can improve the quality of the watermarked audio signal and give more robustness of the watermark
as compared to previous works.

Key-Words: - Audio watermarking, Multiwavelet, Genetic algorithm, Artificial intelligence, Optimization

1 Introduction frequency coefficients in wavelet transform


domain. A scheme of watermark detection is
Digital watermarking is one of the most popular presented by using linear predictive coding, and it
approaches considered as a tool for providing the does not use the original signal during watermark
copyright protection of digital contents. This extracting process. In [3], Chen and Wornell
technique is based on direct embedding of proposed a class of embedding methods called
additional information data into the digital contents. quantization index modulation (QIM) that achieves
The main requirements of digital watermarking are probably good rate-distortion-robustness
invisibility, robustness and data capacity. These performance. Wu et al. [4] proposed a self-
requirements are mutually conflicting, and thus, in synchronization algorithm for audio watermarking
the design of a watermarking system, the trade off using QIM technique. They embed the
has to be made. synchronization codes with hidden informative data
According to the International Federation of so that the hidden data has self-synchronization
the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) [1], audio ability. Synchronization codes and informative bits
watermarking should have the following are embedded into low-frequency subband in DWT
specifications: 1) Audio watermarking should not domain. Their simulations suggest that the
degrade perception of original signal. 2) Signal to quantization step S (embedding strength) greatly
noise ratio ( SNR ) should be greater than 20 dB and depends on types and magnitudes of the original
there should be more than 20 bits per-second (bps) audio signals. It is not the best choice to use a fixed
data payload for watermark. 3) Watermark should quantization step.
be able to resist most common audio processing In recent years, some multiwavelet-based
operations and attacks. 4) Watermark should be digital watermarking algorithms have been
able to prevent unauthorized detection, removal and proposed [5], [6]. In [6], Kumsawat et al. proposed
embedding, unless the quality of audio becomes a multiwavelet-based audio watermarking scheme
very poor. by utilizing the audio statistics characteristics and
In general, digital audio watermarking can be QIM technique. The watermarks are embedded into
performed in time domain and transform domain, the low frequency coefficients in discrete
where the properties of the underlying domain can multiwavelet transform domain to achieve robust
be exploited. Wang et al. [2] proposed a digital performance against common signal processing
audio watermarking algorithm based on the discrete procedures and noise corruptions.
wavelet transform (DWT). The watermark Improvements in performance of digital audio
information is embedded in audio low-middle watermarking schemes can be obtained by

ISSN: 1790-2769 111 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7


Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

exploiting the characteristics of the human auditory concept of the quantization index modulation
system in watermarking process. It is possible to technique. We then describe our proposed
embed perceptually inaudible watermarks with optimization technique in watermarking scheme
more energy in an audio, which makes watermark using genetic algorithm.
more robust. Ding et al. [7] proposed an audio
watermarking scheme based on wavelet packet and 2.1 Watermark Embedding Algorithm
psychoacoustic model. The masking effects of the The watermark embedding algorithm is described
human auditory system are calculated in each as follows:
subband by wavelet packet decomposition. The 1. Generate a seed by mapping a signature or
embedding strength is controlled by the masking text through a one-way deterministic function. The
threshold. Thus, the watermarking scheme has good seed is used as the secret key for watermarking.
secrecy and high robustness. 2. To increase security, perform a pseudo-
Another way to improve the performance of random permutation in order to disperse the spatial
watermarking schemes is to make use of artificial relationship of the binary watermark pattern.
intelligent (AI) techniques. The watermarking Therefore, it would be difficult for a pirate to detect
system can be viewed as an optimization problem. or remove the watermark. We use W and W to
Therefore, it can be solved by genetic algorithm denote the original watermark image and the
(GA), support vector machine (SVM) or adaptive permuted watermark image, respectively. The
tabu search (ATS). There has been little research in relationship between W and W can be expressed as
application of GA to digital audio watermarking W (i, j ) = W (i′, j ′) , where (i ′, j ′) is permuted to the
problems. Ketchem and Vongpradhip [8] presented
pixel position (i, j ) in a secret order using the
audio watermarking technique using multiple
image-based watermark scheme based on genetic secret key. Since the audio signal is one-
algorithm in the DWT domain. They make use of dimensional, we should transform the permuted
genetic algorithm to find the optimum frequency watermark image into the one-dimensional
bands for watermark embedding which can sequence in order to embed it in the audio signal.
simultaneously improve robustness and audio Then, the W is transformed and mapped into a
quality of the watermarked audio. In [9], binary antipodal sequence Wˆ = {wˆ i } for
Sriyingyong and Attakitmongcol proposed a robust i = 1, 2,..., N w , where N w is the length of watermark
audio watermarking method based on the DWT and and wˆ i ∈ {+1,−1} .
the adaptive tabu search. Adaptive tabu search is
3. Transform the original audio signal into
applied to search for optimal intensity of watermark
five-level decomposition using the DMT [11].
such that the watermarked audio quality is
Since the approximation coefficients are supposed
optimized. Wang et al. [10] proposed a support
to be relatively stable and less sensitive to slight
vector machines-based audio watermarking scheme
changes of the audio signal, they are ideal
in wavelet domain. This algorithm embeds the
embedding area. In order to achieve a balance
template information and watermark signal into the
between robustness and fidelity, the coefficients at
original audio by adaptive quantization according
coarsest approximation subband are selected for
to the local audio correlation and human auditory
watermark embedding based-on artificial intelligent
masking.
technique. Furthermore, the coefficients in high-
In this paper, we propose an audio
frequency subband are not used for watermark
watermarking method based on the discrete
embedding because of their low signal energy in
multiwavelet transform. In our algorithm, the
this frequency band.
watermark is embedded into the multiwavelet
4. Select the significant coefficients in the
transform coefficients using quantization index
DMT domain which is the first N w largest
modulation technique. We apply the GA to search
for optimal watermarking parameters in order to coefficients at coarsest approximation subband to
achieve optimum performance. Finally, we have embed the watermark bits. The position of
compared the experimental results before and after significant coefficients will be sent to the receiver
optimization using GA with the results of previous as the side information. To increase the
works. watermarking security, we order the N w largest
coefficients in a pseudorandom manner. The
2 Proposed Method random numbers can be generated using the same
secret key in step (1).
In this section, we first give a brief overview of the 5. For watermark embedding, the sequence
watermark embedding and watermark extracting {wˆ i } is embedded into the selected coefficients by
algorithms in the DMT domain based on the

ISSN: 1790-2769 112 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7


Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

quantization index modulation technique. The ~


3. Inverse the permutation of W * where
quantization function is given as follows: ~* ~* , i = 1, 2, ...N } to obtain the extracted
W = {w i w
~
⎧ ⎣ci / S ⎦ ⋅ S + 3S / 4 if wˆ i = +1 watermark W . In our proposed method, the
ci′ = ⎨ (1) extracted watermark is a visually recognizable
⎩ ⎣ci / S ⎦ ⋅ S + S / 4 if wˆ i = −1 image. After extracting the watermark, we used
normalized correlation coefficients to quantify the
, where ⎣x ⎦ rounds to the greatest integer smaller correlation between the original watermark and the
than x , {ci } and {ci′ } are the DMT coefficients of extracted one. A normalized correlation
~
the original audio data and the corresponding (NC ) between W and W is defined as:
watermarked audio data respectively, and S is
quantization step. A large S makes the watermark Nw
~
∑ wi w
robust, but it will destroy the original quality of the i
~ i =1
audio. Thus, the value of S should be as large as NC (W , W ) = (3)
Nw
2 ~2
possible under the constraint of imperceptibility. In ∑ wi ∑ wi
order to improve both quality of watermarked audio i =1 i
and robustness of the watermark, this work
~
employs the Genetic Algorithm to search for the , where W and W denote an original watermark
optimal quantization step. This quantization step is ~ ~}
and extracted one, respectively and W = {w i
varied to achieve the most suitable watermarked
audio signal for each given audio signal. The details for i = 1, 2,..., N w . The watermark extracting process
of GA optimization process will be described in is shown in Figure 2.
details in Section 2.3.
6. Perform inverse DMT to obtain the
watermarked audio signal. The overall watermark
embedding process is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2 Watermark extracting process

2.3 Improving Performance Using Genetic


Algorithms
In the design of digital audio watermarking system,
Figure 1 Watermark embedding process there are three goals that are always conflicted.
These goals are imperceptibility, robustness and
2.2 Watermark Extracting Algorithm data capacity. In order to minimize such conflicts,
The watermark extracting algorithm is outlined as this work employs the genetic algorithm to search
follows: for optimal watermarking parameters. This allows
1. Transform the watermarked audio signal the system to achieve optimal performance for
into five-level decomposition using the DMT to digital audio watermarking.
obtain detail coefficients and approximation For the optimization process, GA is applied in
coefficients. Then, we choose the first N w largest the watermark embedding and the watermark
coefficients in the coarsest approximation subband extracting processes to search for quantization step
from position in the side information. We further ( S ). The objective function of searching process is
order the N w largest coefficients in a computed by using factors that relate to both
robustness and imperceptibility of a watermark. A
pseudorandom manner using the secret key.
high quality output audio and robust watermark can
2. Let c~i denote the N w largest coefficients of
then be achieved. The diagram of our proposed
the coarsest approximation subband. The embedded algorithm of applying GA is shown in Figure 3 and
watermark can be extracted from c~i by using the details of GA are described as follows:
following rule: The most critical step in the GA optimization
process is the definition of a reliable objective
~* = ⎧ + 1 if c~i − ⎣c~i / S ⎦ ⋅ S ≥ S / 2 function. In this paper, the objective function of GA
w i ⎨ . (2)
⎩ −1 if c~i − ⎣c~i / S ⎦ ⋅ S < S / 2 uses both normalized correlation ( NC ) and
difference ( DIF ) between desired signal-to-noise
ratio ( SNR ) and obtained SNR from each iteration

ISSN: 1790-2769 113 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7


Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

as performance indexes. DIF is an imperceptibility f obj should be optimized at GA processes. By


measure, while NC is a robustness measure. using objective function f obj above, the parameter
According to the International Federation of
the Phonographic Industry, the SNR of watermarked S can be optimally searched to achieve the best of
audio signal should be greater than 20 dB. both output audio quality and watermark
Therefore, the value of desired SNR has been robustness.
assigned to 24 dB in all experiments. During GA- Number of chromosomes used in this work is
based optimization processes, three attacks are 20. The encoding scheme is binary string with 32
chosen to evaluate the imperceptibility and bit resolutions for each chromosome. A ranking
robustness of the embedded watermark. They are selection is chosen for selection mechanism. The
MP3 compression at 64 kbps, Gaussian noise crossover and mutation probability is fixed at 0.7
addition, and re-quantization. Details of these and 0.05, respectively.
attacks will be thoroughly described in Section 3.2.
After obtaining the SNR in the watermarked audio, 3 Experimental Results and
the DIF value and the average of the three Discussions
normalized correlations ( NCave ) after attacking, we
are ready to start the objective function evaluation. In order to demonstrate the performance of the
An illustrative diagram is shown in Figure 3. The proposed algorithm, some numerical experiments
objective function f obj can be evaluated as follow: are carried out to measure the audio quality of the
watermarked audio and evaluate the robustness of
the watermark under typical attacks.
f obj = δDIF × DIF + δ NC × NCave (4)
A set of ten audio signals have been used
as host signals, representing five general classes
, where δ DIF and δ NC are weighting factors of of music. This delineation has been chosen because
DIF and NCave , respectively. These weighting each class has different spectral properties. Each
factors represent the significance of each index audio signal has duration of 30 seconds in the
used in GA searching process. If both indexes are WAV format and is mono, 16 bits/sample, with
equally significant, the values of these factors will sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. A binary logo of size
be 0.5 each where the relationship δ DIF + δ NC = 1.0 32 × 32 pixels ( N w = 1,024) is used as the visually
must always hold. In this work, the weighting recognizable watermark. Consequently, the total
factors δ DIF and δ NC are equally set to 0.5. watermark data rate is 34.14 bps which satisfies the
IFPI requirement described in Section 1. We
use SNR , NC and BER (Bit error rate) to analyze
the performance of the proposed algorithm.

3.1 Imperceptibility Test Results


Figure 4 shows the convergence of GA
optimization at 30 generations of the Pop2 audio
signal. It is obvious that as the number of
generation increases, the improvement of audio
quality ( SNR ) gradually approaches to a saturation
value.

Figure 3 Optimization diagram for digital audio


watermarking using genetic algorithm
Figure 4 SNR , DIF , NCave and f obj from GA
In order to gain the optimal performance of the optimization process
quantization-based audio watermarking system,

ISSN: 1790-2769 114 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7


Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

The resulting parameters, which are displayed the NC and BER from watermark
quantization steps S from GA optimization of 10 extraction. The experimental results given in Table
test audios, are shown in the Table 1. These 2 show that the watermark is not affected by re-
parameters are optimally varied to achieve the most sampling, re-quantization, additive noise, and MP3
desirable ones for original audios with different compression at 64, 96, and 128 kbps. This indicated
characteristics. that the watermark is very robust to these attacks.
The results of watermarked audio quality are For low-pass filtering, cropping, MP3
also shown in Table 1. The results obtained from compression at 56 kbps attacks, the BER values of
our proposed method which is called With-GA the recovered watermark sequence are 8.0133%,
(After optimization) are compared with the method 5.2636% and 0.0977%, for the Without-GA method
without using genetic algorithm which is referred to and 7.0313%, 5.2539% and 0.0977%, for the With-
as Without-GA (Before optimization). In Without- GA method, respectively. Although a lot of loss
GA method, the quantization step is fixed at 0.4. occurred in the audio signal, the bit error rates are
We can see that the proposed method can improve still acceptable. The results show that our proposed
the SNR of the watermarked audio about 2 dB. method yields better results than the method
without GA. Because GA search guarantees the
Table 1 Quantization steps and signal-to-noise ratio global optimum solution, the proposed method can
of watermarked audio signals thus improve the quality of the watermarked audio
With-GA Without-GA and give almost the same robustness of the
Host signals S SNR (dB) SNR (dB) watermark.
Classical1 0.3211 27.39 25.31
Classical2 0.3067 23.84 22.23
Country1 0.3519 30.06 28.60 Table 2 Robustness comparison of our algorithm
Country2 0.3033 25.42 23.06 (average values)
Jazz1 0.3067 25.05 23.03 With-GA Without-GA
Jazz2 0.3067 28.29 26.09 Attack type NC BER (%) NC BER (%)
Rock1 0.3219 28.24 26.73
Attack free 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
Rock2 0.3165 29.83 27.99
Re-sampling 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
Pop1 0.3067 23.55 21.82
Re- 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
Pop2 0.3063 24.94 22.12 quantization
Average 0.3148 26.66 24.69 Low-pass 0.9369 7.0313 0.9292 8.0133
filtering
3.2 Robustness Test Results Additive noise 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
Cropping 0.9529 5.2539 0.9031 5.2636
We first tested the robustness of the proposed MP3-56kpbs 0.9992 0.0977 0.9992 0.0977
algorithm to 10 audio samples under no attacks. If MP3-64kpbs 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
the BER of the recovered watermark sequence is 0, MP3-96kpbs 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
MP3-128kpbs 1.0000 0.0000 1.0000 0.0000
it means that the embedded bit can be recovered
exactly. The effects of the following six types of
attacks are then investigated. Finally, results obtained from our proposed
1. Re-sampling: The audio signal is first down- method which is called With-GA are compared in
sampled at 22.05 kHz, and then up-sampled at 44.1 finer details with the method based on wavelet
kHz. transform and ATS in [9]. In order to compare
2. Re-quantization: The 16-bit watermarked robustness between the two techniques in a fair
audio signals have been re-quantized down to 8 manner, parameters for each scheme should be
bits/sample and back to 16 bits/sample. adjusted so that watermarked audio signals of
3. Low-pass filtering: Low-pass filtering using approximately close imperceptibility are produced.
a second order Butterworth filter with cut-off In these experiments, the SNR of watermarked audio
frequency of 6 kHz, 12 dB/octave roll-off, is in each scheme has been set to 24 dB. According to
performed to the watermarked audio signals. the experimental results, the value of the
4. Addition of noise: White Gaussian noise embedding capacity has been assigned to 34.14 bps
with 1% of the power of the audio signal is added. in all experiments. The comparison results are
5. Cropping: Two thousand samples of each listed in Table 3.
testing signal are cropped out at 5 random Table 3 shows test results of Rock1 audio
positions. signal with no attack, re-sampling, re-quantization,
6. Low bit-rate codec: The robustness against low-pass filtering, addition of noise, cropping and
the low-rate codec was tested by using MPEG 1 MPEG 1 Layer III compression with compression
Layer III compression (MP3) with compression rates of 56, 64, 96 and 128 kbps, respectively. The
rates of 56, 64, 96, and 128 kbps. BER of watermark image and the SNR of digital
Detection results for the various attacks audio signal are also displayed.
described above are shown in Table 2 which

ISSN: 1790-2769 115 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7


Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS International Conference on APPLICATIONS of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

According to these results, the extracted References


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ISSN: 1790-2769 116 ISBN: 978-960-474-171-7

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