Fast protection of H.264/AVC by selective encryption of CABAC

This paper presents a novel method for the protection of copyrighted multimedia content. The problem of selective encryption (SE) has been addressed along with compression for the state of the art video codec H.264/AVC. SE is performed in the context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) module of video codec. For this purpose, CABAC is converted to an encryption cipher by scrambling of equal length binarized code words. In our scheme, CABAC engine serves the purpose of encryption cipher without affecting the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC by keeping the original bitrate, generating completely compliant bitstream and utilizing negligible computational cost. Nine different benchmark video sequences containing different combinations of motion, texture and objects have been subjected to experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm.