Adaptive disparity map computation for stereoscopic video watermarking

By reconsidering some 2D video inherited approaches and by adapting them to the stereoscopic video content and to the human visual system peculiarities, a new disparity map is designed. First, the inner relation between the left and the right views is modeled by some weights discriminating between the horizontal and the vertical disparities. Secondly, the block matching operation is achieved by considering a visual objective measure (NCC) instead of the traditional pixel differences (MSE or SAD). The processed corpus regroups 20 min of stereoscopic video sequences captured within the 3DLive French project (30000 stereo pairs). The new disparity map was benchmarked against two state-of-the-art algorithms, namely the NTSS and the FS-MPEG. The results exhibit quality gains in the reconstructed image between 5.67% and 5.37% in PSNR and between 7.58% and 4.63% in SSIM. The computational cost was reduced by factors between 1.3 and 13. This disparity map was finally integrated into a 3D-TV watermarking method.