Partial Video Encryption Based on Alternating Transforms

• Published in: IEEE signal processing letters Vol. 16; no. 10; pp. 893 - 896
• Main Authors: Yeung, Siu-Kei Au, Zhu, Shuyuan, Zeng, Bing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2009; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Automatic voltage control; Cryptography; Data security; Discrete cosine transforms; Encoding; Encryption; Gold; H264/AVC; Information security; partial encryption; Security; Signal processing; Signal processing algorithms; Transforms; unitary transforms; Video coding; Video compression; video encryption
• ISSN: 1070-9908; 1558-2361
• DOI: 10.1109/LSP.2009.2026109

In this letter, we propose a novel video encryption technique that is used to achieve partial encryption where an annoying video can still be reconstructed even without the security key. In contrast to the existing methods where the encryption usually takes place at the entropy-coding stage or the bit-stream level, our proposed scheme embeds the encryption at the transform stage during the encoding process. To this end, we develop a number of new unitary transforms that are demonstrated to be equally efficient as the well-known DCT and thus used as alternates to DCT during the encoding process. Partial encryption is achieved through alternately applying these transforms to individual blocks according to a pre-designed secret key. Analysis on the security level of this partial encryption scheme is carried out against various common attacks and some experimental results based on H.264/AVC are presented.