A blind quantum audio watermarking based on quantum discrete cosine transform. (December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Nejad, Mohsen Yoosefi; Mosleh, Mohammad; Heikalabad, Saeed Rasouli
• Is Part Of: Journal of information security and applications. Volume 55(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-12
• Subjects: Quantum audio watermarking -- Quantum audio processing -- Least-significant-bit -- Image scrambling; Computer security -- Periodicals; Information technology -- Security measures -- Periodicals; 005.805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jisa.2020.102495
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2214-2126

Abstract

Abstract: As an important security technology, recently quantum watermarking attracted wide research attention. This study presents a blind quantum audio watermarking scheme based on quantum discrete cosine transform (qDCT). In the proposed scheme, the quantum audio signal in quantum representation of discrete signal (QRDS) is transformed into frequency domain using qDCT. The medium frequency components are selected as the target of watermarking. The qubits of previously scrambled watermark image are embedded in three qubits of each frequency component, and inverse qDCT is performed. The reverse process carried out to extract watermark qubits, in which majority voting policy employed to select correct watermark qubit. For every procedure of the proposed scheme, the quantum circuit and complexity analysis is presented. The novelty of the study is to embed watermark data in the medium frequency band of audio signal which is an optimal target for carrying hidden data. Furthermore, the proposed scheme employs parallel processing, the intrinsic powerful property of quantum computing, to perform embedding process efficiently and reduce quantum gates in presented quantum circuits. Based on transparency and robustness evaluation results, the proposed method demonstrated a better robustness than previous works, while keeping the same capacity, without significant change in transparency.