Wavelet decomposition-based stereoscopic 3-D video watermarking — A comparative study

In this paper, two digital watermark algorithms are compared for stereoscopic three-dimensional (3-D) video protection. Dual-tree complex wavelets transform (DT-CWT) and Haar discrete wavelet transform (Haar DWT) are employed to embed an image watermark to left and right views of a stereoscopic video stream. The digital watermark embedded in the selected coefficients of the CB-channel to avoid visual perception of the embedded image by the human eye, which is compared favorably with the widely used watermark embedding approach in YCBCR domain in terms of picture quality and has higher capacity for watermark payload. Results show that the DT-CWT demonstrates better performance than the Harr DWT in terms of robustness, watermark payload and visual transparency. Objective and subjective assessments were conducted on the watermarked 3-D video sequences for performance evaluation. The methods are benchmarked against the state of the art methods such as QIM-NTSS (quantization index modulation — new three-step search) and IProtect, and have survived various types of watermark attacks.