CRAW: Codec Robust Audio Watermarking

arXiv:2609.03107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative speech models have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic from synthetic audio, enabling new forms of fraud and misinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising defense by embedding an imperceptible signal into generated speech that can later be detected to verify its provenance. However, recent studies have shown that existing post-hoc watermarking methods fail under neural codecs and denoisers, transformations routinely applied during real-world storage, transmission, and processing, severely limiting their practical utility. Here we introduce CRAW, a codec-robust audio watermarking framework that jointly improves robustness against neural re-synthesis while maintaining high perceptual quality. CRAW combines distortion-aware training with an attention-based pooling mechanism, inference-time perceptual mask- ing, and an error-correcting code to recover the fidelity lost during robust training. Experiments demonstrate that CRAW achieves state-of-the-art robustness against neural codecs, denoisers, and vocoders while maintaining perceptual quality comparable to existing post-hoc watermarking methods. The code is available at https://github.com/DavidC1212/craw.

Abstract:Recent advances in generative speech models have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic from synthetic audio, enabling new forms of fraud and misinformation. Audio watermarking offers a promising defense by embedding an imperceptible signal into generated speech that can later be detected to verify its provenance. However, recent studies have shown that existing post-hoc watermarking methods fail under neural codecs and denoisers, transformations routinely applied during real-world storage, transmission, and processing, severely limiting their practical utility. Here we introduce CRAW, a codec-robust audio watermarking framework that jointly improves robustness against neural re-synthesis while maintaining high perceptual quality. CRAW combines distortion-aware training with an attention-based pooling mechanism, inference-time perceptual mask- ing, and an error-correcting code to recover the fidelity lost during robust training. Experiments demonstrate that CRAW achieves state-of-the-art robustness against neural codecs, denoisers, and vocoders while maintaining perceptual quality comparable to existing post-hoc watermarking methods. The code is available at this https URL.

Sound (cs.SD); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.03107 [cs.SD]

(or arXiv:2609.03107v1 [cs.SD] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.03107 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

analiza aiqbench

CRAW: Codec Robust Audio Watermarking

Subiecte conexe