Watermark recovery from 2D views of a 3D object using texture or silhouette information

We describe a novel framework for watermarking 3-D objects using their texture or silhouette information. Unlike most conventional 3-D object-watermarking techniques, for which both insertion and extraction of the mark are performed on the object itself (3-D/3-D approach), we propose an asymmetric 3-D/2-D procedure. It consists in watermarking 3-D objects and retrieving the mark from rendering 2-D images or videos having used the 3-D synthetic object, thus protecting the visual representations of the object. Two 3-D object watermarking schemes are presented, a texture-based approach for 3-D photorealistic objects and a silhouette-based approach for 3-D CAD (computer-assisted design) objects.