Research on Robustness of 2D DWT-Based Watermarking in Intermediate Viewpoint by 3D Warping

Abstract

This paper investigates the robustness of watermarking techniques for stereo or multi-view images generated from texture and depth images. A three-dimensional (3D) warping technique is applied to texture and depth images to generate stereo or multiview images for a 3D display. By using the 3D warping technique, in this paper, we developed watermarking techniques and evaluated the robustness of these techniques that can extract watermarks from texture images even when the viewpoints are moved. A depth image is used to generate a stereo image with the largest viewpoint difference to the left and right. The overlapping region in the stereo image that does not disappear after warping is then obtained, and DWT is applied to this region to embed a watermark in the LL sub-band. The proposed watermarking techniques were found to yield bit error rates of about 3%–16% when they were applied to stereo images generated from texture and depth images. Furthermore, the results showed that the copyright could be seen when the extracted watermark was visually confirmed.