Frequency-domain watermarking of 3D DIBR images using the steerable pyramid and discrete cosine transforms

Depth-image-based-rendering (DIBR) is a new 3D rendering method that has been taking an active role in the recent advancements of the 3D technology due to its numerous advantages. The DIBR takes from the content provider side a monoscopic center view and an associated per-pixel depth map, and renders virtual left-eye and right-eye views at the 3D content consumer side. As with other multimedia contents, the center view, and the synthesized left-eye and right-eye views, can be easily duplicated and illegally distributed. Therefore, copyright protection of the three DIBR views must be preserved in this paper, a blind, robust, and imperceptible watermarking algorithm for DIBR images is proposed. The proposed algorithm is based on the steerable pyramid and the discrete cosine transform. The Zernike Moments are also used to increase the robustness of the watermarking scheme. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated with respect to visual quality and robustness of the watermarked DIBR images. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers high visual quality, and is robust against common signal processing attacks. A comparison is made with existing DIBR 3D image watermarking algorithms to demonstrate the efficiency and competiveness of the proposed algorithm.