A blind watermarking scheme for depth-image-based rendered 3D video using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform

The amount of unauthorized distribution of 3D video is increasing day by day due to the availability of high speed Internet and low cost 3D TV. Note that, not only both left and right views generated using depth-image-based rendering can be distributed as 3D content but also the centre, left or right view individually as 2D content. Video watermarking is a possible way to protect this type of illegal distribution. In this paper, we propose a digital watermarking method for depth-image-based rendered 3D video to protect each centre, left, and right view. In this method, the watermark is embedded into the centre view using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. At the receiver, the left and the right views are generated from the centre view and the depth map using depth-image-based rendering. Finally, we extract the watermark from the centre, left and right views in a blind fashion. This scheme is robust to the most common video distortions which include geometric attacks such as scaling, rotation and cropping as well as lossy JPEG compression and additive noise.