A weakly secure multiple description coding scheme in lossy multipath channels for fine-grained SVC streaming

Abstract

Video streaming service is growing rapidly these years. The quality of video streaming may suffer from issues like packet loss and solutions like multiple description coding (MDC) has been shown to provide flexible and distortion-rate optimal video streaming transmission over packet-loss links. On the other hand, the contents of stream are prone to attacks like eavesdropping while MDC is not specifically designed for security purpose. In this paper, fine grain scalably coded video data is channel-coded through multiple description-forward error correction (MD-FEC) coding. The resulting descriptions (packets) are then sent to a variety of channels, which may be peeked by an eavesdropper with certain probability. We adopt the weakly secure design here to reduce the quality of video obtained by the eavesdropper. Two weak security criteria for this problem are proposed, namely the deterministic overhearing peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) constraint and the average overhearing PSNR constraint. The corresponding optimization algorithms are provided. Numerical results show that by applying weakly secure design, the PSNR value on the eavesdropper’s side will be reduced to the level at which useful details of the clip can hardly be exposed at the cost of reducing around 1–2 dB at the authorized receiver’s side.