Wavelet-based high-capacity watermarking of 3-D irregular meshes

Digital watermarking can be used as data hiding technique to interleave cover content with auxiliary information before transmitting and storing applications. While image and video watermarking has been widely studied, much less attention has been paid to its application in 3D mesh models. This is principally due to their intrinsic irregular sampling nature. This paper proposes a high-capacity watermarking scheme for the purpose of inserting meta-data into 3D triangle meshes. Our proposal can be applied to meshes with arbitrary topology by using irregular wavelet-based analysis. The watermark is embedded in an appropriate resolution level by quantizing the norms of wavelet coefficient vectors. To ensure robustness to similarity transformation, a robust synchronization (indexing) mechanism is performed on the 3D model after irregular wavelet analysis. Experimental results show that our watermarking framework is robust to common geometric attacks and can provide relatively high data embedding rate whereas keep a relative lower distortion.