High-Rate Data-Hiding Robust to Linear Filtering for Colored Hosts

The discrete Fourier transform-rational dither modulation (DFT-RDM) has been proposed as a way to provide robustness to linear-time-invariant (LTI) filtering for quantization-based watermarking systems. This scheme has been proven to provide high rates for white Gaussian hosts but those rates considerably decrease for nonwhite hosts. In this paper the theoretical analysis of DFT-RDM is generalized to colored Gaussian hosts supplied with an explanation of the performance degradation with respect to white Gaussian hosts. Moreover the characterization of the watermark-to-noise ratio in the frequency domain is shown as an useful tool to give a simple and intuitive measure of performance. Afterwards an extension of DFT-RDM is proposed to improve its performance for colored hosts without assuming any additional knowledge on the attack filter. Our analysis is validated by experiments and the results of several simulations for different attack filters confirm the performance improvement afforded by the whitening operation for both Gaussian colored hosts and audio tracks.