With the rapid proliferation of social media platforms and user-generated content, audio data is frequently shared, remixed, and redistributed online. This raises urgent needs for copyright protection and traceability to safeguard the integrity and ownership of such content. Resilience to desynchronization attacks remains a significant challenge in audio watermarking. Most existing techniques face a trade-off between embedding capacity, robustness, and imperceptibility, making it difficult to meet all three requirements effectively in real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose an improved patchwork-based audio watermarking algorithm. Each audio frame is divided into two non-overlapping segments, from which mid-frequency energy features are extracted and modulated for watermark embedding. A linearly decreasing buffer compensation mechanism balances imperceptibility and robustness. Additionally, an optimization algorithm is incorporated to enhance watermark transparency while maintaining resistance to desynchronization attacks. During watermark extraction, each bit of the watermark is recovered by analyzing the intra-frame energy relationships. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that the proposed method is robust against various types of attack. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme ensures high audio quality, strong robustness against desynchronization attacks, and a higher embedding capacity than existing methods.
Zhu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.