AAC bitstream watermarking robustness assessment

During the recent years, the advent of the Internet and the availability of high quality audio coding technology have enabled easy access, transmission and consumption of digitally represented music. These new possibilities directly led to an increasing problem of music piracy which besides cryptographic methods is often addressed with watermarking techniques. Especially for online music distribution the so-called transaction watermarking is a promising concept in order to embed customer or transaction specific information into a particular piece of music during the download phase. A beneficial method to perform transaction watermarking is bitstream watermarking which embeds watermarks directly into perceptually coded material. Former publications in the field of bitstream watermarking showed the concept, audio quality results and complexity numbers along with the detection performance. This paper extends former work in presenting a robustness assessment of bitstream wa termarking schemes. Experimental results obtained specifically using MPEG-2/4 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) as encoding scheme are given.