Stereoscopic watermarking by horizontal noise mean shifting

Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) is a method to represent a stereoscopic content. The DIBR consists of a monoscopic center view and an associated per-pixel depth map. Using these two components and given depth condition from a user, the DIBR renders left and right views. The advantages of DIBR are numerous. The user can choose not only the monoscopic or stereoscopic view selectively, but also the depth condition what he prefers when he watches a stereoscopic content. However, in the view of copyright protection, since not only the center view but also each left or right view can be used as a monoscopic content when they are illegally distributed, the watermark signal which is embedded in the center view must have an ability to protect the respective three views. In this study, we solve this problem by exploiting the horizontal noise mean shifting (HNMS) technique. We exploit the fact that the objects in the view are shifted only to horizontal way when the center view renders to the left and right views. Using this fact, the proposed stereoscopic watermarking scheme moves the mean of horizontal noise histogram which is invariant to horizontal shifting, and we achieve good performance as shown in the experimental results.