Authenticating Lossy Surveillance Video

Abstract

Public camera feeds are increasingly being opened to use by multiple authorities (e.g., police, fire, traffic) as well as to the public. Because of the difficulty and insecurity of sharing cryptographic keys, these data are available in the clear. However, authorities must have a mechanism to assure trust in the video, that is, to authenticate it. While lossless video is straightforward to authenticate by cryptographic means, lossy video as may result from UDP, wireless, or transcoded transmissions, is more difficult to authenticate. We describe a method that combines a concise and efficiently computed video fingerprint with public key cryptography. Essential components of our approach are: the procedure to combine inexact video fingerprint with exact digital signature to enable lossy authentication, and matching for misaligned video via a major incline approach. Experimental results relate video fingerprint length to authentication accuracy and latency (time to authentication).