Fragile watermarking of three-dimensional objects

Abstract

There have been many works on watermarking of 2D images and video. However, watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects has received little attentions. We introduce and investigate the watermarking of three-dimensional (3D) objects as compared to 2D images, study the watermarking of objects represented by polygonal models, and propose a new fragile watermarking technique that enables the verification of 3D polygonal models for detecting unauthorized alterations. Our proposed technique consists of a watermark encoding process which embeds a sequence of data bits by perturbing coordinates of the vertices in a 3D model, and a watermark decoding process which extracts bit information from 3D geometry, using secure verification keys. Fast 2D visualization of unauthorized modification to 3D objects is also proposed.