Limits of the current H.264 video crypto-compression methods

In video surveillance scenarios, it is vital to secure the visual content, both during transmission and storage. As these video sequences can represent large volumes of data, it is also necessary to compress them, in order to transmit the most data with the available bandwidth, or reduce their final size. Moreover, video sensors are constantly evolving, offering videos at ever-higher resolutions. Codec H.264 is a video compression standard widely used in video surveillance, even today. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the various crypto-compression techniques based on the codec H.264, in light of this evolution in video resolution. We show that it is quantitatively difficult to find differences between low-resolution and high-resolution crypto-compressed video, while visually, more of the original video content is recognizable at high resolution.