CD Watermarking - More Details
Heathmans Watermarketing service provides a robust, flexible and secure watermarking technology that embraces the new digital information age, and fulfills all the criteria necessary to meet today’s copyright protection requirements:
- A Watermark is inaudible
- It survives all forms of compression, encryption, transmission, duplication and conversion
- It is invisible to all forms of audio analysis
- It can not be removed without damaging the original audio
The Watermark falls below the threshold of audibility at settings tested and verified by “golden ears” from Major Record Labels and leading Mastering Studios around the world.
The Survivable Watermark: In order to survive the harshest delivery methods and most aggressive compression algorithms, the watermark is designed to be inserted only in the regions of the audio signal that are ultimately delivered. Because this area of the audio spectrum is also the most sensitive for human hearing, special characteristics for the coded signals are needed to ensure that they are inaudible but still reliably detected by the decoders.
The special characteristic of our coded signals withstand all compression techniques, like MP3 and Dolby coding and decoding, delivery media distortions like time and frequency variations, format conversions, manipulation of the audio through equalization, and copying. These characteristics also make detection of the watermark information reliable even within noisy audio. Once an audio signal is watermarked by us, it remains watermarked and the information remains detectable.
The Invisible Watermark: The unique encoding technique we employ effectively weaves the watermark into a signal’s audible spectrum by subtly altering minute fragments of existing sound in such a way that the watermark displays no acoustical characteristics or signature of its own. There is no tell-tale signature that can be identified through conventional audio analysis techniques. Because of this, the codes are not detectable and therefore undefeatable.
The Indelible Watermark: Because the encoding technique seamlessly interweaves data into the audio signal, it is impossible to remove without seriously distorting the original audio signal. If anyone manages to even find the code—which in itself is improbable—tampering with the code will damage the audio substantially, greatly diminishing its enjoyment value.
Overview of Technical Operation: Our Watermarking system consists of a key generator, an encoder and a decoder. The key generator produces a field of pseudo-random white noise, based on a 64-bit integer seed value. The encoder marks a music stream with data using the key, and the decoder reads back the data from a marked stream, again using the key. The same key must be used in decode operations as in encode operations or the encoded data will not be visible.
There are multiple benefits to a key–based data carrying watermark. The most obvious benefit is security. In applications whereby authentication of content may be somewhat sensitive a key based algorithm ensures that only those with access to the key file have the ability to decode an audio stream.
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