· 10 min read
What a Codec Does to a Watermark Is a Ceiling, Not a Bug
Published work on audio watermarking reports detection performance near 0.97 on clean audio falling toward chance, about 0.57, under certain neural codecs. That is the transform destroying the embedded signal, not a defect in the detector. Telling a ceiling apart from a bug decides whether the next quarter goes into a better detector or into a different system design, and it is why robustness targets have to be written against named conditions rather than a single number.