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Stereoscopic video watermarking: a comparative study

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Abstract

Despite the sound theoretical, methodological, and experimental background inherited from 2D video, the stereoscopic video watermarking imposed itself as an open research topic. Paving the way towards practical deployment of such copyright protection mechanisms, the present paper is structured as a comparative study on the main classes of 2D watermarking methods (spread spectrum, side information, hybrid) and on their related optimal stereoscopic insertion domains (view or disparity based). The performances are evaluated in terms of transparency, robustness, and computational cost. First, the watermarked content transparency is assessed by both subjective protocols (according to ITU-R BT 500-12 and BT 1438 recommendations) and objective quality measures (five metrics based on differences between pixels and on correlation). Secondly, the robustness is objectively expressed by means of the watermark detection bit error rate against several classes of attacks, such as linear and nonlinear filtering, compression, and geometric transformations. Thirdly, the computational cost is estimated for each processing step involved in the watermarking chain. All the quantitative results are obtained out of processing two corpora of stereoscopic visual content: (1) the 3DLive corpus, summing up about 2 h of 3D TV content captured by French professionals, and (2) the MPEG 3D video reference corpus, composed of 17 min provided by both academic communities and industrials. It was thus established that for a fixed size of the mark, a hybrid watermark insertion performed into a new disparity map representation is the only solution jointly featuring imperceptibility (according to the subjective tests), robustness against the three classes of attacks, and nonprohibitive computational cost.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper, the terms stereoscopic video and 3D video are alternatively employed.

  2. The autostereoscopic displays and the depth image-based rendering (DIBR) imaging are out of the scope of the present paper.

  3. More details for 3D video disparity map computation can be found in [28, 29].

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Acknowledgments

The experimental validation was performed within the 3DLive French project.

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Correspondence to Mihai Mitrea.

Appendix

Appendix

All the experiments reported in the present paper are carried out on two corpora, further referred to as 3DLive and MPEG. Each of these two corpora combines indoor/outdoor, unstable and arbitrary lighting, and still and high motion scenes, as illustrated in Figs. 20 and 21, respectively.

Fig. 20
figure 20

Left and right views sampled from the 3DLive corpus: rugby, volley, dancing, theater, and rock band sequences

Fig. 21
figure 21

Left and right views sampled from the MPEG corpus: rollerbalade, office, city tours, and cartoon sequences

Organized under the framework of the 3DLive French project, the 3DLive corpus (http://3dlive-project.com) sums up 2 h, 11 min, and 24 s of stereoscopic video sequences (197,000 stereoscopic pairs encoded at 25 frames per second). It regroups content sampled from a rugby match, a volleyball match, dancing/theater performances, and a private gig of a rock band. These sequences are full HD-encoded (1,920 × 1,080 pixels).

The MPEG corpus (http://sp.cs.tut.fi/mobile3dtv/stereo-video/) is composed of 41 sequences and sums up to 17 min and 29 s (29,908 stereoscopic pairs, as several frame rates have been considered). Various resolutions are represented, from 320 × 192 to 640 × 480 pixels. The content corresponds to street events, like roller and biking races, indoor (office) scenes, city tours, cartoons, etc. Note that for the sake of uniformity, the frames in Figs. 20 and 21 are presented at the same size, although their actual sizes are very different, as explained above.

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Chammem, A., Mitrea, M. & Prêteux, F. Stereoscopic video watermarking: a comparative study. Ann. Telecommun. 68, 673–690 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12243-013-0384-5

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