Design of a New Format-Compliant Partial Encryption Scheme for H.264 Video

H.264 is the latest video compression standard and its compression efficiency is twice as much as previous standards. Due to the advantages of this standard and its widespread use in various video applications, the protection of this standard has become necessary. In this paper, a new partial encryption scheme is presented for H.264 video which keeps the video format unchanged. In this method, parameters with high sensitivity to H.264 video texture and motion components are encrypted during compression. That is, such parameters as Intra4x4PredMode, Intra Residual Data, Ref-Index and MVD are encrypted using stream ciphers. This encryption scheme obtains high encryption efficiency through reducing the encrypted data volume along with high perceptual security. In addition to these properties, parameter selection and encryption in the proposed method is implemented in a way that the encrypted video format is kept compliant and thus can be utilized in different applications such as commercial and entertainment applications.