Applying Stenography to Music Captioning

Lukasz Grzegorz Maciak
Micheal Alexis Ponniah
Renu Sharma

10/03/05

The object of this project is to use stenography metodology to embed textual information such as lyrics or captioning directly in music files. Usually close captioning or lyrics for a music file is provided either as a seperate file or as a secondary chanell using a special composite file format. We want to be able to use a popular media format such as mp3 or wav and embed this type directly into that file, without altering it's original content.

To make this possible we want to use stenographic methodology to "hide" the textual data in the music file. This way, and oridinary player will be able to play that file without ever noticing the added content. On the other hand a specialized application or a plugin should be able to extract this information and display it on the screen as lyrics or close captioning sychronized with the playback.

We will seek to accomplish the following:

• Research the existing technologies using stenography to embed text in popular music formats
• Establish how much text can be stored in highly compressed formats such as mp3 - and establish if it is feasible to efficiently store captioning or lirycs for that format
• Research methods to synchronize the displayed text with the beat of the music (either manual or automatic)
• Implement an application which allows the music file to be played while displaying the embeded text. This will be either implemented as a standalone java based player, a plugin to an existing media player or a helper application intended to work along side a media player.

System Requirements

• The stegonographic module requires JDK 1.3 or higher.


• The mp3 player requires JMF. Please see their webpage for instalation instructuons

Installation Instructions

The stegonographic module is a stand alone jar file. There is no need for installation. The mp3 player requires installation of the JMF framework. Please consult their webpage for installation instructions.

Once JMF is installed and configured, unzip the javaPlayer.zip and compile the source. Make sure mp3stego.jar is in the classpath.

Usage

To embed lyrics into mp3 file run:

java -jar mp3stego.jar mp3_file.mp3 lyrics_file.txt

To extract lyrics from an mp3 file run:

java -jar mp3stego.jar mp3_file.mp3

To extract lyrics from another java application call the static method decode in the Main class of mpstego package. This method takes a string representing path to the mp3 file and returns lyrics in a string delimited by newlines and the pipe character (|):

String lyrics = mpstego.Main.decode(mp3_file_name);

To run the mp3 player run:

java javaPlayer

Then use GUI to navigate.

Downloads

• The research paper can be downloaded here: [HTML Format] or [WORD DOCUMENT .doc]


• The powerpoint presentation: MP3Stegonography.ppt


• Download the stegonographic module mp3stego.jar 12-12-2005


• View Javadoc Documentation for the stegonographic module here.


• Download the mp3 player (stegonographic module included) javaPlayer.zip. This is a modified version of David Barron's open source java mp3 player.