Abstract

3D printing has recently been applied to many areas of life including education, healthcare, aerospace, automotive, industrial design and other domains in industry. Due to the fact that the benefit of 3D printing is significant, the copyright issue of 3D printing has been become essentially and importantly. To solve the copyright issue of 3D printing, we would like to propose a 3D printing watermarking algorithm based on the mean distance of 2D slices in this paper. In the proposed method, 3D printing model is sliced into a set of 2D slices, and each 2D slice is then embedded a bit of watermark data by changing the length of mean distance of that slice. Finally, the coordinates of points in each 2D slice will be altered according to the changed mean distance value of 2D slice which has been embedded watermark bit. Experimental results showed that the mean distance error between the watermarked 2D slices and the original 2D slices is very small. The bit error rate (BER) between the extracted watermark and the original watermark is also very low. So, we verify that the invisibility of the proposed method is effective, and the proposed method is also robust to geometric attacks as rotation, scaling, and translation. Comparing to the conventional works, the proposed method also provides a solution with better accuracy.