3D model watermarking

Abstract

3D meshes have been used more and more widely in industrial, medical and entertainment applications during the last decade. Many researchers, from both the academic and industrial sectors, have become aware of intellectual property protection and authentication problems arising with their increasing use. Apart from in familiar multimedia combinations, such as images, text, audio and video, the issues of copyright protection and piracy detection are now emerging in the fields of CAD, CAM, computer aided education (CAE) and computer graphics (CG), etc. Scientific visualization, computer animation and virtual reality (VR) are three hot topics in the field of computer graphics. On the one hand, with the development of collaborative design and virtual products in the network environment, it is expected that consumers will prefer models consisting of points, lines and faces, rather than material objects or accessories. As a result, only the authorized user can replicate, modify or recreate the model. The models that we handle are all three dimensional and digital, which can be called 3D graphics, 3D objects or 3D models. The issue of how to protect and even manipulate and control 3D models and other CAD products is now involved. On the other hand, with the rapid development in communication and distribution technology, digital content creation sometimes requires the cooperation of many creators. In particular, the scale of 3D objects is large and special skills are needed for the creation of 3D objects. Therefore, to create good and complex 3D content, the cooperation of many creators may be necessary and important. In the scenario of the joint-creation of 3D objects in a manufacturing environment, the creatorship of the participating creators becomes a big issue. There are some concerns for participating creators during the creation process. Firstly, each participating creator wants to prove his/her creatorship. Secondly, all of the participating creators want to verify the joint-creatorship of the whole product. Thirdly, it is necessary to prevent some creators from neglecting other creators and asserting the whole creatorship of the final product and selling the product to a buyer. How we protect each creator’s creatorship and how we account for his/her level of contribution are a major challenge.