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A practical design of content protection for H.264/AVC compressed videos by selective encryption and fingerprinting

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Abstract

Digital Rights Management (DRM) of videos is an important issue nowadays. Considering that H.264/AVC videos will be widely used in various applications, we propose a practical design, which combines the methodologies of selective encryption and fingerprinting, for effective DRM of H.264/AVC streaming videos. A selective encryption scheme is first presented to scramble the video content by encrypting a small amount of data in the compressed bit-stream. The scrambled video is H.264-compliant to reduce the complexity of decoder since it can still be played without triggering errors in the decoding process. A fingerprinting scheme is then introduced to provide further protection. We extract a reasonable amount of data from the video and embed the watermark acting as the fingerprint of the video recipient. To acquire the high-quality video for viewing, the user has to decrypt the video obtained from a video server and then combine it with the watermarked data provided from a user information server. The resulting viewable video is thus fingerprinted to deter the user from illegally redistributing the content. Experimental results will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Science Council in Taiwan, R.O.C., under Grants NSC96-2221-E-008-098- and NSC97-2752-E-008-001-PAE.

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Jhongli, 32001, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Po-Chyi Su, Chih-Wei Hsu & Ching-Yu Wu

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  1. Po-Chyi Su
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  2. Chih-Wei Hsu
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  3. Ching-Yu Wu
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Correspondence to Po-Chyi Su.

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Su, PC., Hsu, CW. & Wu, CY. A practical design of content protection for H.264/AVC compressed videos by selective encryption and fingerprinting. Multimed Tools Appl 52, 529–549 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0458-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0458-6

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