Audio Information Hiding Based on Cochlear Delay Characteristics with Optimized Segment Selection

Audio information hiding (AIH) based on cochlear delay (CD) characteristics is a promising technique to deal with the trade-off between inaudibility and robustness requirements effectively. However, the use of phase-shift keying (PSK) for blindly detectable AIH based on CD characteristics caused abrupt phase changing (phase spread spectrum), which leads to bad inaudibility. This paper proposed the technique to reduce the spread spectrum from PSK by segment selection process with spline interpolation optimization. Objective evaluation to measure the detection accuracy (BDR) and inaudibility (PEAQ and LSD) was carried out with 102 various genre music clips dataset. Based on the evaluation result, our proposed method could successfully reduce the spread spectrum caused by PSK by having improvement on inaudibility test with adequate detection accuracy up to 1024 bps.