It provides a mechanism for copyright protection of digital media by embedding information identifying the owner in the data.
With the recent growth of networked digital multimedia systems, the ease with which perfect copies can be made will lead to the large-scale illegal copying, forgery and distribution of digital audio, images, video, 3D and animated 3D models. Watermarking provides a mechanism to prevent (deter) illegal copy of digital contents and improve verification process for legitimate ownership claims. The technique used in watermarking is called stegonagraphy. Steganography simply takes one piece of information (embedded object), hides it within original document (cover object) and produce a stego object. Watermarking uses stegonagraphy to enable enables authors to control the distribution of and to verify ownership of their digital information by embedding identifying information in the original document.
Goal
While there has been active research in digital watermarking for images, video, or audio, only recently have a few papers addressed watermarking 3D models. At time of this writing, we are not aware of any research in animated 3D models. The importance of watermarking for animated 3D models is very transparent considering the burst of animated movies.
First we would like to utilize to the animated 3D models several ideas such as the spread-spectrum method of Cox et al, the multiresolution method of Praun et al, embedding primitive method of Ohbuchi et al and geometric method of Benedens which have been developed for images and 3D models.
Second we would put efforts to find novel ideas for 3D model watermarking for mesh models as well as to develop watermarking schemes for other surface representation such as B-spline patches, subdivision surfaces, implicit surfaces.
In both cases, various cryptographic methods and their suitability according to the purposes of watermarking will be explored. Furthermore, we will test the robustness of our schemes under various attacks. (I think the part of the issues can be omitted.) Some of issues involved are as follow:
In what object do we want to embed watermarks?
Basic representations of 3D model and what basis functions to apply spread-spectrum method?
Robust watermarks or fragile watermarks?
And protection against which kind of attacks?
~ 10/15/02
Reading on rudiments of surface
representations, animation, cryptography, watermarking, and multiresolution
analysis
~ 11/15/02 Implement and experiment with known algorithms and contemplate on novel schemes for 3D and 4D models
~ 12/15/02 Implement novel methods, prepare for final presentation and explore future research
References:
[1] Praum, E., Hoppe,
H., and Finkelstein, A. Robust Mesh Watermarking. In ACM SIGGRAPH 99 Conference
Proceedings
(July. 1999) , pp. 69-76.
[2]
OHBUCHI, R., MASUDA, H., AND AONO, M. Watermarking three-dimensional polygonal
models through geometric and topological modifications. IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas in Communications 16, 4 (May 1998), pp. 551-559.
[3] BENEDENS, O. Geometry-based watermarking of 3d models, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (Jan. 1999), 46-55.
[4] COX, I. J., KILLIAN, J., LEIGHTON, T., AND SHAMOON, T. Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 12, 6(1997), 1673-1687.
[5] KANAI, S., DATE, H., AND KISHINAMI, T. Digital Watermarking for 3D Polygons using Multiresolution Wavelet Decomposition. Proc. Sixth IFIP WG 5.2 GEO-6(December 1998), pp.296-307.
[6] OHBUCHI,
R., SHIGEO, T., MIYAZAWA, T., AND MUKAIYAMA, AKIO. Watermarking 3D Polygonal
Meshes in the Mesh Spectral Doamin. In Proc. Graphics Interface 2001,
p.9-17, 2001
[7]
TAKE-HOON, K., JEHEE, L,. AND SUNG YONG, S., Robust Motion Watermarking based
on Multiresolution Analysis. Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 19 No.3, pp
189-198, 2000 (Proc. EUROGRAPHICS ‘2000).
[8] OHBUCHI, R., MASUDA, H., AND AONO, M. A Shape-Preserving Data Embedding Algorithm for NURBS Curves and Surfaces. Computer Graphics International 1999(CGI ’99)