Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-019-01299-4 A Semi-Fragile Digital Audio Watermarking Scheme for MP3-Encoded Signals Using Huffman Data Salma Masmoudi 1 · Maha Charfeddine 1 · Chokri Ben Amar 1 Received: 19 October 2018 / Revised: 26 October 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Dynamic development in the field of information technologies, storage and sharing a large amount of data via Internet, raises the following question: How to ensure and protect a multimedia document against illegal distribution, reproduction and copy- ing? One of the proposed solutions is digital watermarking which is an approach that embeds imperceptible information into digital data. Although most of the known algorithms operate in the uncompressed or linear domain, few are able to embed watermarks in the compressed domain. This paper describes an audio watermarking scheme that operates directly in the compressed domain. It inserts watermark in MP3 bit streams. Our scheme uses Huffman data mainly big values region and recompres- sion calibration to hide secret information. Furthermore, it allows blind retrieval of an embedded watermark which does not need the original audio. Experimental results prove the imperceptibility of the proposed method and the robustness against several attacks. Keywords Audio watermarking · MP3 compression · Huffman data · Big values region · Robustness 1 Introduction Multimedia data manipulation has become simple due to technology advances in recent years. Some applications like multimedia identification, copyright verification and B Salma Masmoudi masmoudi.salma@ieee.org Maha Charfeddine maha.charfeddine.tn@ieee.org Chokri Ben Amar chokri.benamar@ieee.org 1 REGIM-LAB: REsearch Group on Intelligent Machines University of Sfax, National Engineering School of Sfax (ENIS), BP 1173, Sfax 3038, Tunisia