Performance Comparison on Speech Codecs for Digital Watermarking Applications

Using intelligent information contained within the speech to identify the specific hidden data in the watermarked multimedia data is considered to be an efficient method to achieve the speech digital watermarking. This paper presents the performance comparison between various types of speech codec in order to determine an appropriate one to be used in digital watermarking applications. In the experiments, the speech signal encoded by four different types of speech codec, namely CELP, GSM, SBC and G.723.1codecs is embedded into a grayscale image, and theirs performance in term of speech recognition are compared. The method for embedding the speech signal into the host data is borrowed from a watermarking method based on the zerotrees of wavelet packet coefficients. To evaluate efficiency of the speech codec used in watermarking applications, the speech signal after being extracted from the attacked watermarked image will be played back to the listeners, and then be justified whether its content is intelligible or not.