A study of the impact of light fields watermarking on the perceived quality of the refocused data

Securing multimedia data from undesired manipulation is a widely investigated topic in the state of the art. A large number of techniques has been developed for protecting images, videos, and also audio from malicious attacks. Nowadays new imaging systems pose new challenges from the data protection point of view. In particular, plenoptic cameras allow to record multiple views of a scene by using a single camera in a single shot, thus avoiding the problems related to calibration and camera synchronization. In this contribution, a novel embedding scheme tuned to light fields is presented. The watermark is inserted in the horizontal and vertical detail subbands of the first level of the Haar wavelet transform. The aim of this work is twofold: the design of a water-marking system that does not affect the depth map estimation procedure and therefore the refocusing procedure and the 3D scene reconstruction. On the other hand, the impact of light field data modification with respect to the perceived quality has been investigated. Experimental tests, both objective and subjective, have been carried out for assessing the performances of the proposed algorithm.