Efficient multi-level security for robust 3D color-plus-depth HEVC

Abstract

This paper presents two robust hybrid watermarking techniques for securing the Three-Dimensional High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC). The first watermarking technique is the homomorphic-transform-based Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. The second watermarking technique is the three-level Discrete Stationary Wavelet Transform (DSWT) in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. The objective of the two proposed hybrid watermarking techniques is to increase the immunity of the watermarked 3D-HEVC streams to attacks. Also, we propose a wavelet-based fusion technique to combine two depth watermark frames into one fused depth watermark frame. Then, the resultant fused depth watermark is encrypted using chaotic Baker map to increase the level of security. After that, the resultant chaotic encrypted fused depth watermark is embedded in the 3D-HEVC color frames using the proposed hybrid watermarking techniques to produce the watermarked 3D-HEVC streams. In addition to achieving multi-level security in the transmitted 3D-HEVC streams, the proposed hybrid techniques reduce the required bit rate for transmitting the color-plus-depth 3D-HEVC data over limited-bandwidth networks. The performance of the proposed hybrid techniques is compared with those of the state-of-the-art techniques. Extensive simulation results on standard 3D video sequences have been conducted in the presence of attacks. The obtained results confirm that the proposed hybrid fusion-encryption-watermarking techniques achieve not only a good perceptual quality with high Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values and less bit rate, but also high correlation coefficient values between the original and extracted watermarks in the presence of attacks. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid techniques improve the capacity of information embedding and the robustness without affecting the perceptual quality of the original 3D-HEVC frames. Indeed, the extraction of the encrypted, fused, primary, and secondary depth watermark frames is possible in the presence of attacks.