Towards 3D watermarking technology

In the last years the applications using and managing 3D data are quickly increasing: archaeological site reproduction, virtual museums (in the field of Cultural Heritage); games, animations, special effects (in the field of entertainment); enhanced user navigation, e-commerce, virtual reality (in Internet) are only some examples of the potentialities of such data. In this evolving scenario the demand for IPR protection of this kind of multimedia data is growing and new interest is moving towards 3D watermarking. This paper discusses some issues on 3D watermarking, such as robustness and visual quality, and presents a panoramic on some 3D watermarking models proposed so far. Regarding the visual quality aspect, a novel solution to reduce the perceptibility of the watermark, embedded through vertices perturbations is proposed.