Title
Blind Watermarking for 3-D Printed Objects by Locally Modifying Layer Thickness
Abstract
We propose a new blind watermarking algorithm for 3D printed objects that has applications in metadata embedding, robotic grasping, counterfeit prevention, and crime investigation. Our method can be used on fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers and works by modifying the printed layer thickness on small patches of the surface of an object. These patches can be applied to multiple regions of the object, thereby making it resistant to various attacks such as cropping, local deformation, local surface degradation, or printing errors. The novelties of our method are the use of the thickness of printed layers as a one-dimensional carrier signal to embed data, the minimization of distortion by only modifying the layers locally, and one-shot detection using a common paper scanner. To correct encoding or decoding errors, our method combines multiple patches and uses a 2D parity check to estimate the error probability of each bit to obtain a higher correction rate than a naive majority vote. The parity bits included in the patches have a double purpose because, in addition to error detection, they are also used to identify the orientation of the patches. In our experiments, we successfully embedded a watermark into flat surfaces of 3D objects with various filament colors using a standard FDM 3D printer, extracted it using a common 2D paper scanner and evaluated the sensitivity to surface degradation and signal amplitude.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TMM.2019.2962306
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Blind watermarking,layer thickness,metadata,paper scanner,3D printing
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
1520-9210
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arnaud Delmotte100.34
Kenichiro Tanaka201.01
Hiroyuki Kubo31110.03
Takuya Funatomi47424.62
Yasuhiro Mukaigawa547853.31