Texture-based watermarking of 3D video objects

We describe a novel framework for watermarking three-dimensional (3D) video objects via their texture information. Unlike classical algorithms dealing with 3D objects that operate on meshes in order to protect the object itself, the main goal of our work is to retrieve information originally hidden in the textured image of the object from resulting images or videos having used the 3D synthetic object, thus protecting the visual representations of the object. After developing the theory and practical details of this 3D object watermarking scheme, we present the results of several experiments carried out in various conditions, ranging from ideal conditions (e.g., known rendering parameters) to more realistic conditions (e.g, unknown rendering parameters, but estimated from a two-dimensional view) or within the context of attacks (e.g., mesh reduction).