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Abstract

A novel educational platform for voice over Internet protocol speech communication is proposed in this paper with the aim of further presenting a course of digital speech signal processing. The proposed platform can transmit a speech signal while a secret message is simultaneously embedded in the transmitted encoded bits of this speech signal. Data hiding techniques usually consider two issues, embedding capacity and speech quality. Consequently, in order to achieve high embedding capacity and good speech quality, a data hiding scheme combining discrete cosine transform and voice activity detection algorithms is presented in this paper. This work has two major contributions. First, the embedding capacity of secret speech is increased by 95%, while maintaining good secret speech quality because the secret speech is firstly encoded before embedding into the cover (carrier) speech. Secondly, the characteristics of speech signals can be understood and the proposed information hiding technique for speech signals can be explored. The results of an imperceptibility evaluation indicated that the average perceptual evaluation of the speech quality score degraded slightly by 0.03 relative to that of the cover speech that had no hidden data. The experimental results showed that our proposed hiding scheme not only achieves imperceptibility but also provides a high data-embedding capacity at an average of 8252 bits per second. Objective and subjective evaluations verified that our proposed hiding scheme can achieve a large data-embedding capacity with imperceptible distortion in the stego-speech quality.

Keywords

Discrete cosine transform voice over internet protocol educational platform embedding capacity imperceptibility signal processing

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A speech communication educational platform with high-capacity information hiding scheme

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