A new 3D unseen visible watermarking and its applications to multimedia

In this paper, a novel data hiding scheme, 3D unseen visible watermarking (UVW) based on depth no-synthesis-error (D-NOSE) model is proposed. The proposed method has the ability to detect which region of a depth map is suitable for watermark embedding and calculate optimal variation of pixel values for watermarking. The watermark is embedded into the suitable region by modifying the depth map with optimal variation pixel values to ensure that the watermarked cover can be perceived the same as the original one under normal rendering conditions. In the proposed 3D UVW scheme, hidden information can be extracted successfully by the human visual system (HVS) when changing the rendering conditions. Experimental results prove that the proposed scheme has the robustness and imperceptibility while depth distortions follow the thresholds derived from this paper.