Fragile watermarking of 3D motion data

With the increase in demand of motion planning solutions for digital actors in animation movies, 3D games and virtual reality, copyright protection of motion data becomes increasingly important. Likewise, a lot of time and effort is invested in generating motion capture data, which is susceptible to plagiarism due to its digital nature. To address this problem, watermarking techniques have been used for copyright protection of digital data. This paper proposes a fragile watermarking algorithm for 3D motion curves. An imperceptible watermark is inserted into the wavelet coefficients of the 3D motion data prior to publishing the 3D digital work that utilizes the motion data. The novelty of the proposed scheme lies in using wavelet transform for watermark insertion. To detect altered or plagiarized copies of the 3D motion data, the extracted watermark is compared to the originally inserted watermark. If the comparison results fall within a threshold value, the motion data is declared as authentic, else flagged as plagiarized or tampered. Experimental results indicate that the proposed watermarking scheme is imperceptible and resistant to affine transformations.