Abstract
The recent development of 3D printing technology has brought concerns about its potential misuse, such as in copyright infringement and crimes. Although there have been many studies on blind 3D mesh watermarking for the copyright protection of digital objects, methods applicable to 3D printed objects are rare. In this paper, we propose a novel blind watermarking algorithm for 3D printed objects with applications for copyright protection, traitor tracing, object identification, and crime investigation. Our method allows us to embed a few bits of data into a 3D-printed object and retrieve it by 3D scanning without requiring any information about the original mesh. The payload is embedded on the object's surface by slightly modifying the distribution of surface norms, that is, the distance between the surface and the center of gravity. It is robust to resampling and can work with any 3D printer and scanner technology. In addition, our method increases the capacity and resistance by subdividing the mesh into a set of bins and spreading the data over the entire surface to negate the effect of local printing artifacts. The method's novelties include extending the vertex norm histogram to a continuous surface and the use of 3D moments to synchronize a watermark signal in a 3D-printing context. In the experiments, our method was evaluated using a public dataset against center, orientation, minimum and maximum norm misalignments; a printing simulation; and actual print/scan experiments using a standard 3D printer and scanner.
Highlights
T HREE-DIMENSIONAL (3D) printing has expanded substantially in recent years, with affordable and reliable printers starting at a few hundred dollars, as well as an increasing diversity of supported materials, such as plastic, metal, concrete, ceramic, and even food
The proposed method is an extension of our previous paper [12], which was based on the 3D mesh watermarking method from Cho et al [13], [14], that used a distribution of vertex norms
One of the goals of watermarking is to embed data in the model without it being visible to the human eye. We evaluated it with the same metrics as the 3D digital watermarking benchmark [11]: a geometrical metric called the maximum root mean square (MRMS) and a perceptual metric called the mesh structural distortion measure (MSDM) [49]
Summary
T HREE-DIMENSIONAL (3D) printing has expanded substantially in recent years, with affordable and reliable printers starting at a few hundred dollars, as well as an increasing diversity of supported materials, such as plastic, metal, concrete, ceramic, and even food. By embedding a different ID in each object sold or provided under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), we can identify users who illegally distribute the model This process, called traitor tracing, is often used in other media. If 3D printer and scanner manufacturers agreed on a common watermarking method, it would be possible to produce a “no-copy” flag that would prevent the print or scan of copyrighted objects. If the leaker is distributing physical copies printed after scanning the object, the watermarking method must be robust to the reprint. This paper extends our conference paper [12] that proposed a blind watermarking method robust to the print/scan process and based on the vertex norm watermarking technique [13], [14].
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