In this paper, a robust and perceptually transparent single-level and multi-level blind audio watermarking scheme using wavelets is proposed. A randomly generated binary sequence is used as a watermark, and wavelet function coding is used to embed the watermark sequence in audio signals. Multi-level watermarking is used to enhance payload capacity and can be used for a different level of security. The robustness of the scheme is evaluated by applying different attacks such as filtering, sampling rate alteration, compression, noise addition, amplitude scaling, and cropping. The simulation results obtained show that the proposed watermarking scheme is resilient to various attacks except cropping. Perceptual transparency of watermark is measured by using Perceptual Evaluation of Audio Quality (PEAQ) basic model of ITU-R (PEAQ ITU-R BS.1387) on Speech Quality Assessing Material (SQAM) given by European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Average Objective Difference Grade (ODG) measured for this method is -0.067 and -0.080 for single-level and multi-level watermarked audio signals, respectively. In the proposed single-level digital audio watermarking scheme, the payload capacity is increased by 19.05% as compared to the single-level Chirp-Based Digital Audio Watermarking (CB-DAWM) scheme.

In building speech recognition based applications, robustness to different noisy background condition is an important challenge. In this paper bimodal approach is proposed to improve the robustness of Hindi speech recognition system. Also an importance of different types of visual features is studied for audio visual automatic speech recognition (AVASR) system under diverse noisy audio conditions. Four sets of visual feature based on Two-Dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform feature (2D-DCT), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Two-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform followed by DCT (2D-DWT- DCT) and Two-Dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform followed by PCA (2D-DWT-PCA) are reported. The audio features are extracted using Mel Frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) followed by static and dynamic feature. Overall, 48 features, i.e. 39 audio features and 9 visual features are used for measuring the performance of the AVASR system. Also, the performance of the AVASR using noisy speech signal generated by using NOISEX database is evaluated for different Signal to Noise ratio (SNR: 30 dB to −10 dB) using Aligarh Muslim University Audio Visual (AMUAV) Hindi corpus. AMUAV corpus is Hindi continuous speech high quality audio visual databases of Hindi sentences spoken by different subjects.