MelShield: Robust Mel-Domain Audio Watermarking for Provenance Attribution of AI Generated Synthesized Speech
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866911640559026176 |
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| author | Jin, Yutong Li, Qi Liu, Lingshuang Ni, Jianbing |
| author_facet | Jin, Yutong Li, Qi Liu, Lingshuang Ni, Jianbing |
| contents | In this paper, we propose MelShield, a robust, in-generation, keyed audio watermarking framework that embeds identifiable signals into AI-generated audio for copyright protection and reliable attribution. Specifically, MelShield operates in the Mel-spectrogram domain during the generation process, targeting intermediate acoustic representations in Mel-conditioned pipelines for text-to-speech (TTS) generation. The core idea is to treat the intermediate Mel-spectrogram as the host signal and embed a short binary payload via low-energy, keyed spread-spectrum perturbations distributed across carefully selected time-frequency regions prior to waveform synthesis. By performing watermarking before vocoder inference, MelShield remains plug-and-play for Mel-conditioned TTS architectures and does not require modification or retraining of the underlying TTS generation vocoder, such as DiffWave and HiFi-GAN. Moreover, the multi-user keyed construction enables scalable user-specific attribution, while the keyed verification mechanism limits unauthorized decoding, thereby reducing the risk of large-scale extractor probing and adversarial analysis. Extensive experiments on DiffWave and HiFi-GAN demonstrate that MelShield achieves reliable watermark extraction, approaching 100\% bit accuracy, even under signal distortions, e.g., compression and additive noise, while preserving high perceptual audio quality. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01515 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | MelShield: Robust Mel-Domain Audio Watermarking for Provenance Attribution of AI Generated Synthesized Speech Jin, Yutong Li, Qi Liu, Lingshuang Ni, Jianbing Sound Cryptography and Security In this paper, we propose MelShield, a robust, in-generation, keyed audio watermarking framework that embeds identifiable signals into AI-generated audio for copyright protection and reliable attribution. Specifically, MelShield operates in the Mel-spectrogram domain during the generation process, targeting intermediate acoustic representations in Mel-conditioned pipelines for text-to-speech (TTS) generation. The core idea is to treat the intermediate Mel-spectrogram as the host signal and embed a short binary payload via low-energy, keyed spread-spectrum perturbations distributed across carefully selected time-frequency regions prior to waveform synthesis. By performing watermarking before vocoder inference, MelShield remains plug-and-play for Mel-conditioned TTS architectures and does not require modification or retraining of the underlying TTS generation vocoder, such as DiffWave and HiFi-GAN. Moreover, the multi-user keyed construction enables scalable user-specific attribution, while the keyed verification mechanism limits unauthorized decoding, thereby reducing the risk of large-scale extractor probing and adversarial analysis. Extensive experiments on DiffWave and HiFi-GAN demonstrate that MelShield achieves reliable watermark extraction, approaching 100\% bit accuracy, even under signal distortions, e.g., compression and additive noise, while preserving high perceptual audio quality. |
| title | MelShield: Robust Mel-Domain Audio Watermarking for Provenance Attribution of AI Generated Synthesized Speech |
| topic | Sound Cryptography and Security |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01515 |