With the rapid growth of digital communication systems, ensuring the security and integrity of audio data has become increasingly important. This paper presents a hybrid approach for secure audio communication that integrates encryption and watermarking techniques to provide dual-layer protection. In the proposed system, the audio signal is first processed using transform-based watermarking methods, such as Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), to embed hidden information for authentication and ownership verification. The watermarked audio is then encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to ensure confidentiality during transmission. At the receiver side, the encrypted signal is decrypted to recover the watermarked audio, followed by watermark extraction and verification to ensure data integrity. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using quantitative metrics, including Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that the DWT-based approach provides better audio quality and robustness compared to the SVD-based method, while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency. The proposed hybrid framework effectively combines the strengths of encryption and watermarking, offering a secure, reliable, and practical solution for audio communication systems.
Mishra et al. (Thu,) studied this question.