Stereo video is an important future trend in video technologies and intellectual property rights protection for stereo video should be resolved in advance to avoid piracy.In this paper

based on our previous research work on both digital watermarking and stereo video

a novel adaptive digital watermarking algorithm for stereo video is proposed after analyzing the characteristics of stereo video.The watermark is embedded into disparity vectors of enhancement-layer stream

without affecting the structure of base-layer stream.The proposed algorithm is an adaptive one

which keep the quality degradation of the overall reconstructed video images being the smallest.The whole watermarking process is mainly performed in compressed domain without the need of the fully decoding of compressed stream.And watermark detection can be blindly performed without the need of the original video sequence.As a whole

the proposed algorithm is fast

simple.Experimental results with several stereo sequences show that the embedding of watermark has little affection on image quality and the degradation of PSNR with the adaptive algorithm is smaller than that with non-adaptive algorithm.