View invariant 3D video watermarking using depth based embedding

In this paper, a video watermarking scheme is proposed to embed the watermarking with the depth sequences of the respective video frames for multi-view video plus depth (MVD) based 3D video sequences. To make the scheme invariant to 3D-HEVC compression attack, motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) is done over the video sequences to find motion-coherent connected pixels. Scale- invariant feature transform (SIFT) is done on the temporally filtered frame to make the proposed method view invariant. Moreover, embedding zone for watermarking has been selected in such a way that no watermark can be inserted in the foreground object to avoid perceptible artefacts. Also, a novel watermark embedding policy is used to insert the watermark with the depth of the 3D video to resist the view synthesis as well as video compression attack and temporal scalable attack on the depth sequences. A comprehensive set of experiments is carried out to justify the robustness of the proposed scheme.