Due to the growth of internet and advances in web browsers, digital multimedia contents, are being easily shared and transmitted all over the web. To this end, protecting the intellectual property of digital images is strongly demanded. Digital image watermarking has been proposed in order to protect the copyright of digital images. Digital image watermarking techniques embed the owners’ copyright information into the cover media. In past decades, three dimensional media contents have been produced to improve the perception of depth and realism. Three-dimensional (3D) imaging systems are becoming increasingly popular. Due to the similarity to human visual system, two images taken from slightly different perspectives, is the most common format in stereoscopic applications. Although the stereo image pairs and their applications are becoming increasingly popular, very few algorithms have been proposed for copyright protection of this type of images. The existing methods do not consider the binocular visual quality of stereo pairs. In this thesis, we propose an adaptive watermarking method which takes into account the binocular visual quality of stereo images. To this end, the proposed scheme embeds a watermark in DCT coefficients of contourlet transform. It uses Binocular Just Noticeable Difference (BJND) model as a guide map for adaptive determination of strength factors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a good tradeoffbetween robustness and traarency while preserving the binocular visual constraints of stereo pairs. Keywords: Watermarking, adaptive watermarking, image depth
