A robust watermarking scheme for 3D triangular mesh models

Copyright protection of digital media has become an important issue in the creation and distribution of digital content. As a solution to this problem, digital watermarking techniques have been developed for embedding specific information identifying the owner in the host data imperceptibly. Most watermarking methods developed to date mainly focused on digital media such as images, video, audio, and text. Relatively few watermarking methods have been presented for 3D graphical models. In this paper we propose a robust 3D graphical model watermarking scheme for triangle meshes. Our approach embeds watermark information by perturbing the distance between the vertices of the model to the center of the model. More importantly, to make our watermarking scheme robust against various forms of attack while preserving the visual quality of the models our approach distributes information corresponds to a bit of the watermark over the entire model, and the strength of the embedded watermark signal is adaptive with respect to the local geometry of the model. We also introduce a weighting scheme in the watermark extraction process that makes watermark detection more robust against attacks. Experiments show that this watermarking scheme is able to withstand common attacks on 3D models such as mesh simplification, addition of noise, model cropping as well as a combination of these attacks. © 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.