Smart selective encryption of CAVLC for H.264/AVC video

In this paper we present a new approach of selective encryption (SE) of video. SE is currently applied to video codec H.264/AVC in order to perform confidentiality and preserve bitrate and data size of the underlying video sequence. Our approach analyzes, each macro-block of a given video sequence, separately before its entropy encoding. In this way, the system decides whether it is necessary to or not to encrypt the current macro-block. On the former case, the selected macro-block is encrypted using the SE-CAVLC in the entropy encoder. This approach allows to encrypt a smaller part of the macro-blocks without disturbing the level of confidentiality.