Three-dimensional video watermarking - a review and open challenges

Intellectual property (IP) protection of three-dimensional (3-D) media is an important issue for both academic and wider communities to combat the illegal distribution and pirating of this visual medium. Digital watermarking has been used to address various challenges in media IP protection. The challenge central to 3-D video as well as other audio-visual signal watermarking is that given a fixed level of perceptual transparency, a watermarking system cannot simultaneously achieve a high degree of robustness and a high watermark payload. The majority of published research reports in this field try to introduce new embedding methodologies to increase the watermark robustness with highest possible visual media quality. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art in 3-D video watermarking and assesses various watermarking techniques in the field. Some of 3-D video watermarking techniques are directly inherited from video watermarking, stereo image watermarking or 3-D mesh watermarking, and therefore the relevant techniques in these fields are reviewed in this paper as well. Key performances of various embedding algorithms are examined and compared in this review to identify a benchmark for future development and performance evaluation of new 3-D video watermarking techniques