Algorithm for secure visual communication

The enormous size of video data of natural scene and objects is a practical threat to storage, transmission. The efficient handling of video data essentially requires compression for economic utilization of storage space, access time and the available network bandwidth of the public channel. In addition, the protection of important video is of utmost importance so as to save it from malicious intervention, attack or alteration by unauthorized users. Therefore, security and privacy has become an important issue. Since from past few years, number of researchers concentrate on how to develop efficient video encryption for secure video transmission, a large number of multimedia encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature like selective encryption, complete encryption and entropy coding based encryption. Among above three kinds of algorithms, they all remain some kind of shortcomings. In this paper, we have proposed a lightweight selective encryption algorithm for video conference which is based on efficient XOR operation and symmetric hierarchical encryption, successfully overcoming the weakness of complete encryption while offering a better security. The proposed algorithm guarantees security, fastness and error tolerance without increasing the video size.