Depth-based view-invariant blind 3D image watermarking

With the huge advance in Internet technology as well as the availability of low-cost 3D display devices, 3D image transmission has become popular in recent times. Since watermarking has become regarded as a potential Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools in the past decade, 3D image watermarking is an emerging research topic. With the introduction of the Depth Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) technique, 3D image watermarking is a more challenging task, especially for synthetic view generation. In this article, synthetic view generation is regarded as a potential attack, and a blind watermarking scheme is proposed that can resist it. In the proposed scheme, the watermark is embedded into the low-pass filtered dependent view region of 3D images. Block Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) is used for spatial-filtration of the dependent view region to find the DC coefficient with horizontally shifted coherent regions from the left and right view to make the scheme robust against synthesis view attack. A comprehensive set of experiments have been carried out to justify the robustness of the proposed scheme over related existing schemes with respect to Stereo JPEG compression and different noise addition attacks.