Watermarking in Audio using Deep Learning

Sammanfattning: Watermarking is a technique used to used to mark the ownership in media such as audio or images by embedding a watermark, e.g. copyrights information, into the media. A good watermarking method should perform this embedding without affecting the quality of the media. Recent methods for watermarking in images uses deep learning to embed and extract the watermark in the images. In this thesis, we investigate watermarking in the hearable frequencies of audio using deep learning. More specifically, we try to create a watermarking method for audio that is robust to noise in the carrier, and that allows for the extraction of the embedded watermark from the audio after being played over-the-air. The proposed method consists of two deep convolutional neural network trained end-to-end on music with simulated noise. Experiments show that the proposed method successfully creates watermarks robust to simulated noise with moderate quality reductions, but it is not robust to the real world noise introduced after playing and recording the audio over-the-air.