Robust Unseen Visible Watermarking for Depth Map Protection in 3D Video

In 2D-to-3D video conversion process, 3D video can be generated from 2D video and its corresponding depth map by depth image based rendering (DIBR). The depth map is the key in the conversion process as it provides immersive experience to viewers. So the copyright protection for depth map must be considered. Traditional unseen visible watermarking (UVW) for depth map protection cannot resist filtering attacks. In this paper, a robust unseen visible watermarking (RUVW) scheme is proposed, in which the watermark regions without interference are detected for embedding, the copyright information is enhanced with Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and watermark can be seen directly when the rendering conditions are changed. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good robustness against various attacks such as scaling, filtering, noises and compression.