Perceptual Watermarking for 3D Stereoscopic Video Using Depth Information

Three dimensional (3D) video technologies have made noticeable progress and become common. The 3D videos using depth image based rendering (DIBR) technique are getting the spotlight due to its visual reality, however, they are exposed to illegal distribution. To protect 3D video contents from copyright infringement, a 3D video watermarking scheme can be employed. Since 3D display itself may give rise to unnatural artifacts and arouse visual fatigue to audiences, the imperceptibility is considered as the most significant factor. In this paper, a 3D video watermarking which focuses on perceptual embedding is introduced. The proposed scheme exploits visual characteristics, motion on z-axis and pixels to be hidden by rendering, from depth information. For evaluating the proposed scheme, a stereoscopic display environment is set and the mean opinion score (MOS) is measured as a subjective quality measure for the watermarked 3D videos. Experimental results prove that our proposed scheme has less affect on the perceptibility when watching 3D videos. Also, the proposed method is robust against lossy compression and adding Gaussian noise.