A new perceptual assessment methodology for selective HEVC video encryption

Abstract

Video data security is one of the most research topic in the recent years. It is widely used in the multimedia applications such as video-conferencing, Video on Demand and Pay-TV services. Although many video encryption methods and objective measurements have been employed, few real time schemes and no subjective studies have been proposed. In this paper we investigate a set of selective video encryption schemes by encrypting only a few parameters in HEVC video streams. Firstly, we carried out an in-depth subjective study of three proposed selective HEVC video encryption schemes. A panel of observers has participated in this test campaign in order to evaluate the degree of visibility of the encrypted videos at different bitrates. Experimental results are presented and analysed, showing therefore that two proposed selected encryption schemes allow a high perceptual security level by masking the whole details of the video content, while the third scheme achieves a high security level, with a content nearly unidentifiable. In addition, subjective scores can be used as ground truth for assessing selective video encryption methods, instead of classical objective signal-based metrics, which are not correlated with human judgment.