360-degree VR Video Watermarking based on Spherical Wavelet Transform

Yanwei Liu

Abstract:

Similar to conventional video, the increasingly popular 360◦
virtual reality (VR) video requires
copyright protection mechanisms. The classic approach for copyright protection is the introduction
of a digital watermark into the video sequence. Due to the nature of spherical panorama, traditional
watermarking schemes that are dedicated to planar media cannot work efficiently for 360◦ VR video.
In this paper, we propose a spherical wavelet watermarking scheme to accommodate 360◦ VR video.
With our scheme, the watermark is first embedded into the spherical wavelet transform domain of
the 360◦ VR video. The spherical geometry of the 360◦ VR video is used as the host space for the
watermark so that the proposed watermarking scheme is compatible with the multiple projection
formats of 360◦ VR video. Second, the just noticeable difference model, suitable for head-mounted
displays (HMDs), is used to control the imperceptibility of the watermark on the viewport. Third,
besides detecting the watermark from the spherical projection, the proposed watermarking scheme
also supports detecting watermarks robustly from the viewport projection. The watermark in the
spherical domain can protect not only the 360◦ VR video but also its corresponding viewports.
The experimental results show that the embedded watermarks are reliably extracted both from the
spherical and the viewport projections of the 360◦ VR video, and the robustness of the proposed
scheme to various copyright attacks is significantly better than that of the competing planar-domain
approaches when detecting the watermark from viewport projection