Protection of depth-image-based rendering 3D images using blind watermarking

The content protection for image-based 3D data is getting more importance with the advance of low cost 3D display devices. The depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) 3D image is one of the image-based 3D data which consists of the centre image and the depth image generated by the content provider. The left-eye image and the right-eye image are rendered from the centre image and the depth image at the content consumer side. The blind watermarking for DIBR 3D image is rarely studied in the literature. In this project, a novel blind multiple watermarking scheme is proposed to deal with the content protection problem of DIBR 3D images. Besides the usual requirement of mutual orthogonally among reference patterns for multiple water mark embedding, we found that proper embedding order plays an even more important role in watermarking the DIBR 3D images. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against the JPEG compression and noise adding attacks. More interestingly, it is found that the proposed watermarking can also tolerate large range variations of the depth image during rendering.