Audio DataHiding has been certified by STEP

October 6, 2000 -- The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) announced that it has completed its STEP2000 project for evaluating and certifying audio "digital watermark" technology and certified five firms as those possessing technology recommended for use by enterprises involved in digital music distribution.

The five certified companies are IBM Corp., MarkAny Inc. of Korea, Victor Co. Ltd. (JVC) of Japan, Blue Spike Inc. of the United States and Signum of the United Kingdom. TRL Audio DataHiding was the technology submitted by IBM Corp.. While all the companies except IBM were said that there is a room for further improvement such as tuning balance, only DataHiding was certified as it was.

October 19, 2001 -- JASRAC, CISAC and BIEM have completed "STEP2001", their final selection of audio watermarking technology. STEP2001 certified IBM and Verance as the firms which attained the feasible level of technology. In addition, M-ken and MarkAny are also certified as the firms anticipated to attain the feasible level.

The submitted watermark technologies were expected to embed 2 bits for Copy Control Information (CCI) in the timeframe of 15 seconds and 72 bits for Copyright Management Information (CMI) in the timeframe of 30 seconds. And they were evaluted with respect to their robustness and transparency.

1. Robustness
   The embedded information is supposed to be extractable even after the following Processing;
   

   Test item	Processing
   D/A、A/D conversion	Digital -> Analog -> Digital
   Downmixing	Stereo(2ch) -> mono
   Downsampling	44.1kHz->16kHz
   Dynamic range compression	16 bits -> 8 bits
   Pitch shifting	+10% and -10%
   Random stretching	+10% and -10%
   Lossy audio compression	MPEG1 Layer3 (MP3) (128kbps, 96kbps, 64kbps(mono)) MPEG2 AAC (128kbps, 96kbps) ATRAC (Version 4.5) ATRAC3 (132kbps, 105kbps) RealAudio (128kbps, 64kbps) Windows Media Audio (128kbps, 64kbps)
   Broadcasting	FM (FM multiple broadcast, terrestrial hertzian TV broadcast) AM (AM broadcast) PCM (Satellite TV broadcast : communication satellite, broadcasting sattelite)
   Additive noise	White noise (S/N: -40dB)

   
   
2. Transparency
   Four individuals each from recording engineers, mastering engineers, synthesizer manipulaters, and audio critics are selected to test the transparency of the watermark.