Selective Encryption of VVC Encoded Video Streams for the Internet of Video Things

TL;DR

This paper proposes a selective encryption method for VVC encoded videos to enhance security in IoT applications, achieving high visual security with minimal impact on compression efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel selective encryption scheme targeting key syntax elements in VVC, balancing security and compression performance.

Findings

Encrypted videos offer higher visual security than previous standards.

The encryption scheme causes only a 2-3% increase in bit rate.

Integration into VVC encoder has minimal impact on compression efficiency.

Abstract

Visual sensors serve as a critical component of the Internet of Things (IoT). There is an ever-increasing demand for broad applications and higher resolutions of videos and cameras in smart homes and smart cities, such as in security cameras. To utilize this large volume of video data generated from networks of visual sensors for various machine vision applications, it needs to be compressed and securely transmitted over the Internet. H.266/VVC, as the new compression standard, brings the highest compression for visual data. To provide security along with high compression, a selective encryption method for hiding information of videos is presented for this new compression standard. Selective encryption methods can lower the computation overhead of the encryption while keeping the video bitstream format which is useful when the video goes into untrusted blocks such as transcoding or watermarking. Syntax elements that represent considerable information are selected for the encryption, i.e., luma Intra Prediction Modes (IPMs), Motion Vector Difference (MVD), and residual signs., then the results of the proposed method are investigated in terms of visual security and bit rate change. Our experiments show that the encrypted videos provide higher visual security compared to other similar works in previous standards, and integration of the presented encryption scheme into the VVC encoder has little impact on the bit rate efficiency (results in 2% to 3% bit rate increase).