Audio Watermerking of MP3 Music Signals for Quality Assessment in Multimedia Communication

In this paper, we propose an audio watermarking procedure in order to provide a quality assessment of the received audio signal after an MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) coding/transmission process. Specifically, a fragile watermark is hidden in an MP3-like host data audio transport stream using a spread-spectrum approach. At the receiver, the watermark is extracted and compared to its original counterpart. Since the alterations endured by the watermark are likely to be suffered by the MP3-file, as they follow the same communication link (including coder and transport connection), the watermark’s degradation can be used to estimate the overall alterations endured by the entire MP3-data. The Quality of service (QoS) assessment is based on the evaluation of both objective (Mean Square Error) and subjective (International Telecommunication Union Standard for Objective Measurement of Audio Quality) indicators. The proposed technique has been designed for application to mobile multimedia communication systems. The results obtained through our simulation trials confirm the sensitivity of such approach.