Abstract
This paper presents one of the first methods allowing the protection of the newly emerging video codec HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Visual protection is achieved through selective encryption (SE) of HEVC-CABAC binstrings in a format compliant manner. The SE approach developed for HEVC is different from that of H.264/AVC in several aspects. Truncated rice code is introduced for binarization of quantized transform coefficients (QTCs) instead of truncated unary code. The encryption space (ES) of binstrings of truncated rice codes is not always dyadic and cannot be represented by an integer number of bits. Hence they cannot be concatenated together to create plaintext for the CFB (Cipher Feedback) mode of AES, which is a self-synchronizing stream cipher for so-called AES-CFB. Another challenge for SE in HEVC concerns the introduction of context, which is adaptive to QTC. This work presents a thorough investigation of HEVC-CABAC from an encryption standpoint. An algorithm is devised for conversion of non-dyadic ES to dyadic, which can be concatenated to form plaintext for AES-CFB. For selectively en-crypted binstrings, the context of truncated rice code for binarization of future syntax elements is guaranteed to remain unchanged. Hence the encrypted bitstream is format-compliant and has exactly the same bit-rate. The proposed technique requires very little processing power and is ideal for playback on hand held devices. The proposed scheme is acceptable for DRM of a wide range of applications , since it protects the contour and motion information, along with texture. Several benchmark video sequences of different resolutions and diverse contents were used for experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm. A detailed security analysis of the proposed scheme verified the validity of the proposed encryption scheme for content protection in a wide range of applications.