Virtual view invariant domain for 3D video blind watermarking

Abstract

3D video content has been receiving increasing interest over the last few months and created challenges regarding how to protect such high valued items. For instance, depth-image-based rendering techniques allowing for the creation of virtual views may impair underlying watermarks embedded within individual views. In contrast with previous works, this article focus on defining a view-independent watermark embedding domain rather than a watermarking system coherent with the disparity across several views, thus permitting blind detection. More specifically, based on the fact that pixel displacements across views most often reduce to horizontal shifts, the average luminance value along the rows of the video frames have been selected for watermark embedding. Experimental results clearly prove the robustness of the watermark against virtual views generation.