Disparity Guided Exhibition Watermarking for 3D Stereo Images

In this paper, a watermarking scheme for 3D stereo images is presented. The target application is 3D Digital Cinema. The watermarking is based on a dependent stereo image coding scheme, where the watermark is embedded in the JPEG2000 decoding pipeline after the inverse quantization and prior to the inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT). A perceptual mask is designed to cope with the particularity of the 3D perception and is tuned by the disparity map and the wavelet properties related to the Human Visual System (HVS). In this scheme, the watermark is inherited in the target image during the decoding process and hence, both the reference and the target image in the stereo pair are watermarked. Our results show improvements due to the integration of the 3D visual mask in terms of Structural Similarity Metric (SSM) and Bit Error Rate (BER)