A robust and synthesized-unseen watermarking for the DRM of DIBR-based 3D video

Digital watermarking is an effective technique for the digital rights management (DRM) of depth-image-based rendering (DIBR)-based 3D videos, which is still a crucial issue in the 3D TV industry. However, the existing watermarking schemes for DIBR-based 3D videos either cause irreversible distortions in the synthesized 3D videos or are not robust against some of the typical video attacks. In this paper, a novel robust and synthesized unseen watermarking scheme is proposed for the DRM of DIBR-based 3D videos. This scheme embeds watermarks into the pseudo-3D-discrete cosine transform (3D-DCT) domain of the depth maps based on quantization index modulation (QIM) and determines the embedding strength based on a novel self-adaptive mechanism. Our analysis and experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme not only avoids distortion in the synthesized 3D videos but also is sufficiently robust against various attacks, with average normalized correlations (NCs) between original and extracted watermarks higher than 0.9819 and average bit error rates (BERs) lower than 0.0196. Therefore, the proposed scheme offers a better solution for the DRM of DIBR-based 3D videos than the current state-of-the-art watermarking schemes.