A Robust Quantum Audio Watermarking Using Synergy of Echo Hiding and Least Significant Bit Technique

With the advent of quantum computers, the need to protect quantum data as a fundamental issue has attracted the attention of researchers. In this article,, a quantum audio watermarking approach based on a combination of echo hiding and least significant bit (LSB) methods is proposed. In the embedding stage, the proposed approach first converts the host audio signal into QRDS quantum display form and then generates a quantum echo signal from it. Next, ,it inserts the watermark data qubits into the resulting quantum echo signal using the least significant bit method. Finally, the watermarked quantum signal is obtained from the result of the original quantum signal and the echo quantum signal. In the extraction phase, of the proposed approach, based on the difference between the samples of the original quantum signal and the received quantum signal, the watermark qubits are recovered. In addition, quantum reversible circuits for insertion and extraction processes have been designed and implemented. The results obtained from the evaluation and comparison of the proposed approach, in terms of transparency, robustness to attacks and also the embedding capacity, show that the proposed scheme compared to the quantum watermarking methods based on the LSB method, has a higher resistance . In addition, the proposed method has a very good transparency (SNR=66.26dB) at the embedding capacity of 512 kbps, which shows that the proposed method has been able to improve the compromise between robustness, transparency and capacity.