From their competition (Score 2, Informative)

I'm a member of the team from Rice University that went up against the guys from the Technion in the DSP Challenge finals. You can whine all you want about wheter audio watermarking is the right thing to do, but you can't deny that these guys put together a *really* cool system.

Their presentation to the judges was very impressive (we presented first, and all I could think while watching theirs was "we're screwed..."). They demonstrated both the addition and detection of a watermark for pre-recorded and live audio. A couple of times, they played out loud just the watermark. It was pretty garbled, but you could definitely make out the content of the original audio. They did it for both vocal and instrumental music; both times, you could make out the lyrics and melody of the original sound. And when combined with the original, the watermark was inaudible (as promised).

But the most impressive part of all is that it was all done in real-time. They watermarked the audio from a local radio station as it was being broadcast, playing both the resulting watermark and watermarked audio with virtually no delay.

I told them in Dallas, but I'll say it again- Congratulations on winning. You guys were definitely worthy competition. With any luck, we'll face each other again next time around.
-patrick