A Low Distortion Audio Self-Recovery Algorithm Robust to Discordant Size Content Replacement Attack

• Main Authors: Juan Jose Gomez-Ricardez, Jose Juan Garcia-Hernandez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-07-01
• Series: Computers
• Subjects: audio signal; content replacement attack; decimation; discordant size; interpolation; self-recovery
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-431X/10/7/87

Although the development of watermarking techniques has enabled designers to tackle normal processing attacks (e.g., amplitude scaling, noise addition, re-compression), robustness against malicious attacks remains a challenge. The discordant size content replacement attack is an attack against watermarking schemes which performs content replacement that increases or reduces the number of samples in the signal. This attack modifies the content and length of the signal, as well as desynchronizes the position of the watermark and its removal. In this paper, a source-channel coding approach for protecting an audio signal against this attack was applied. Before applying the source-channel encoding, a decimation technique was performed to reduce by one-half the number of samples in the original signal. This technique allowed compressing at a bit rate of 64 kbps and obtaining a watermarked audio signal with an excellent quality scale. In the watermark restoration, an interpolation was applied after the source-channel decoding to recover the content and the length. The procedure of decimation–interpolation was taken because it is a linear and time-invariant operation and is useful in digital audio. A synchronization strategy was designed to detect the positions where the number of samples in the signal was increased or reduced. The restoration ability of the proposed scheme was tested with a mathematical model of the discordant size content replacement attack. The attack model confirmed that it is necessary to design a synchronizing strategy to correctly extract the watermark and to recover the tampered signal. Experimental results show that the scheme has better restoration ability than state-of-the-art schemes. The scheme was able to restore a tampered area of around 20% with very good quality, and up to <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mn>58.3</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>% with acceptable quality. The robustness against the discordant size content replacement attack was achieved with a transparency threshold above <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mo>−</mo><mn>2</mn></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>.