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

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.