A robust blind watermarking algorithm for depth-image-based rendering 3D images

The protection of 3D contents from illegal distribution has attracted considerable attention and depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) is proved to be a promising technology for 3D image and video displaying. In this paper, we propose a new digital watermarking scheme for DIBR 3D images based on feature regions and ridgelet transform (RT). In this scheme, the center view and the depth map are made available at the content provider side. After selecting the reference points of the center view, we construct the feature regions for watermark embedding. Considering the sparse image representation and directional sensitivity of the RT, the watermark bits are embedded into the amplitudes of the ridgelet coefficients of the most energetic direction. The virtual left and virtual right views are generated from the watermarked center view and the associated depth map at the content consumer side. The watermarked view has good perceptual quality under both the objective and subjective image quality evaluations. The embedded watermark can be detected blindly with low bit error rate (BER) from the watermarked center view, the synthesized left and right views even when the views are distorted and distributed separately. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme exhibits good performance in terms of robustness against various image processing attacks. Meanwhile, our method can be robust to common DIBR processing, such as depth image variation, baseline distance adjustment and different rendering conditions. Furthermore, compared with other related and state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm shows higher accuracy in watermark extraction.