Privacy region protection for H.264/AVC with enhanced scrambling effect and a low bitrate overhead

While video surveillance systems have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, they have introduced concerns over privacy invasion. Recent research to address these privacy issues includes a focus on privacy region protection, whereby existing video scrambling techniques are applied to specific regions of interest (ROI) in a video while the background is left unchanged. Most previous work in this area has only focussed on encrypting the sign bits of nonzero coefficients in the privacy region, which produces a relatively weak scrambling effect. In this paper, to enhance the scrambling effect for privacy protection, it is proposed to encrypt the intra prediction modes (IPM) in addition to the sign bits of nonzero coefficients (SNC) within the privacy region. A major issue with utilising encryption of IPM is that drift error is introduced outside the region of interest. Therefore, a re-encoding method, which is integrated with the encryption of IPM, is also proposed to remove drift error. Compared with a previous technique that uses encryption of IPM, the proposed re-encoding method offers savings in the bitrate overhead while completely removing the drift error. Experimental results and analysis based on H.264/AVC were carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods. In addition, a spiral binary mask mechanism is proposed that can reduce the bitrate overhead incurred by flagging the position of the privacy region. A definition of the syntax structure for the spiral binary mask is given. As a result of the proposed techniques, the privacy regions in a video sequence can be effectively protected by the enhanced scrambling effect with no drift error and a lower bitrate overhead.     

分布式信源编码错误漂移消除机制的研究

传统视频编码标准由于具有较高的视频压缩效率而得到广泛使用,但是该方法存在错误漂移的现象,而分布式信源编码是当前解决这一现象行之有效的方法。目前提出的错误漂移消除机制采用固定间隔的方法,即每隔几帧选取一帧用于阻止错误漂移,但是该方法在选取视频帧的时候没有考虑被选取视频帧与前后帧的相关性,缺乏灵活性,针对这一问题提出了基于相关性的错误漂移消除选取机制。实验结果证明,该方法可以获得较好的解码效果。     

Error resilience of multireference motion compensated prediction in video coding

Standard coded video is vulnerable to transmission errors when transmitted over unreliable channels. The authors propose using multireference motion compensated prediction (MCP) to provide resilience to transmission errors. Both the concealment error and propagation error can be reduced in multireference MCR. First, using the multiple motion vectors associated with each coded block, a concealment scheme of low complexity with small concealment error is proposed. Then the theoretical performance limit of propagation error and coding efficiency in multireference MCP is analysed. Through a numerical solution based on the theoretical performance limit, it is found that a multireference MCP scheme can achieve greater propagation error attenuation than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. The numerical solution also demonstrates that the performance of the multireference MCP average scheme approaches the theoretical performance limit, with coding efficiency higher than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. Finally, results of a simulation under the assumed packet loss environment typical of the Internet are given. Simulation results demonstrate that video coding with multireference MCP performs much better than the conventional H.263 coding scheme in a lossy environment.     

Robust global motion estimation oriented to video object segmentation.

Most global motion estimation (GME) methods are oriented to video coding while video object segmentation methods either assume no global motion (GM) or directly adopt a coding-oriented method to compensate for GM. This paper proposes a hierarchical differential GME method oriented to video object segmentation. A scheme which combines three-step search and motion parameters prediction is proposed for initial estimation to increase efficiency. A robust estimator that uses object information to reject outliers introduced by local motion is also proposed. For the first frame, when the object information is unavailable, a robust estimator is proposed which rejects outliers by examining their distribution in local neighborhoods of the error between the current and the motion-compensated previous frame. Subjective and objective results show that the proposed method is more robust, more oriented to video object segmentation, and faster than the referenced methods.     

Low-complexity video coding based on two-dimensional singular value decomposition

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity video coding scheme based upon 2-D singular value decomposition (2-D SVD), which exploits basic temporal correlation in visual signals without resorting to motion estimation (ME). By exploring the energy compaction property of 2-D SVD coefficient matrices, high coding efficiency is achieved. The proposed scheme is for the better compromise of computational complexity and temporal redundancy reduction, i.e., compared with the existing video coding methods. In addition, the problems caused by frame decoding dependence in hybrid video coding, such as unavailability of random access, are avoided. The comparison of the proposed 2-D SVD coding scheme with the existing relevant non-ME-based low-complexity codecs shows its advantages and potential in applications.     

Drift controlled scalable wavelet based video coding in the overcomplete discrete wavelet transform domain

Traditional video coders use the previous frame to perform motion estimation and compensation. Though they are less complex and have minimum coding delays, these coders lose their efficiency when subjected to scalability requirements. Recent 3D wavelet coders using lifting schemes offer high compression efficiency and scalability without significant loss in performance. The main drawback of 3D coders is that they process several frames at a time. This introduces additional delay, which makes them less suitable for real time applications.In this work, we propose a novel scheme to minimize drift in scalable wavelet based video coding, which gives a balanced performance between compression efficiency and reconstructed quality with less drift. Our drift control mechanism maintains two frame buffers in the encoder and decoder; one that is based on the base layer and one that is based on the base plus enhancement layers. Drift control is achieved by switching between these two buffers for motion estimation and compensation. Our prediction is initially based on the base plus enhancement layers buffer, which inherently introduces drift in the system if a part of the enhancement layer is not available at the receiver. A measure of drift is computed based on the channel information and a threshold is set. When the measure exceeds the threshold, i.e., when drift becomes significant, we switch the prediction to be based on the base layer buffer, which is always available to the receiver. We also developed an adaptive scheme with additional computation overhead at the encoder to decide the switching instance. The performance of the threshold case that needs fewer computations is comparable with the adaptive scheme. Our coder offers high compression efficiency and sustained video quality for variable bit rate wireless channels. This proves that we need not completely eliminate drift and decrease compression efficiency to get better received video quality.     

Energy-efficient video streaming over Bluetooth using rateless coding

Energy-efficient error control for IEEE 802.15.1 (Bluetooth) video communication is proposed. The scheme is based on block-oriented incremental redundancy provided by rateless coding and receiver feedback. Results are presented for time-sensitive video streaming applications under a Markovian channel model. When the proposed algorithm is compared to variations of Bluetooth forward error control, there are improvements of around 3 dB in received video quality and of over 10% in energy efficiency.     

A novel selective encryption scheme for H.264/AVC video with improved visual security

As cloud storage becomes more popular, concerns about data leakage have been increasing. Encryption techniques can be used to protect privacy of videos stored in the cloud. However, the recently proposed sketch attack for encrypted H.264/AVC video, which is based on the macroblock bitstream size (MBS), can generate the outline images of both intra-frames and inter-frames from a video encrypted by most existing encryption schemes; thus, the protection of the original video may be considered a failure. In this paper, a novel selective encryption scheme for H.264/AVC video with improved visual security is presented. Two different scrambling strategies that do not destroy the format compatibility are proposed to change the relative positions between macroblocks in intra-frames and inter-frames respectively, which in turn substantially distort the sketched outline images so that they do not disclose meaningful information. Moreover, the sign bits of non-zero DCT coefficients are encrypted to contribute to the visual security of our scheme, and an adaptive encryption key related to the intra prediction mode and the DCT coefficient distribution of each frame is employed to provide further security. The experimental results show that our encryption scheme can achieve a better visual scrambling effect with a small adverse impact on the video file size. Furthermore, the security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can successfully resist the MBS sketch attack compared with other related schemes. The proposed method is also proven secure against some other known attacks.     

Sliding‐window forward error correction using Reed‐Solomon code and unequal error protection for real‐time streaming video

Forward error correction (FEC) techniques are widely used to recover packet losses over unreliable networks in real‐time video streaming applications. Traditional frame‐level FEC encodes 1 video frame in each FEC coding window. By contrast, in the expanding‐window FEC scheme, high‐priority frames are included in the FEC processing of the following frames, so as to construct a larger coding window. In general, expanding‐window FEC improves the recovery performance of FEC, because the high‐priority frame can be protected by multiple windows and the use of a larger coding window increases the efficiency. However, the larger window size also increases the complexity of the coding and the memory space requirements. Consequently, expanding‐window FEC is limited in terms of practical applications. Sliding‐window FEC adopts a fixed window size in order to approximate the performance of the expanding‐window FEC method, but with a reduced complexity. Previous studies on sliding‐window FEC have generally adopted an equal error protection (EEP) mechanism to simplify the analysis. This paper considers the more practical case of an unequal error protection (UEP) strategy. An analytical model is derived for estimating the playable frame rate (PFR) of the proposed sliding‐window FEC scheme with a Reed‐Solomon erasure code for real‐time non‐scalable streaming applications. The analytical model is used to determine the optimal FEC configuration which maximizes the PFR value under given transmission rate constraints. The simulation results show that the proposed sliding‐window scheme achieves almost the same performance as the expanding‐window scheme, but with a significantly lower computational complexity.     

Error-resilient scalable compression based on distributed video coding

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new paradigm for video compression based on the information theoretical results of Slepian–Wolf (SW) and Wyner–Ziv (WZ). In this work, a performance analysis of image and video coding schemes based on DVC is presented, addressing temporal, quality and spatial scalability. More specifically, conventional coding is used to obtain a base layer while WZ coding generates the enhancement layers. At the decoder, the base layer is used to construct Side Information (SI) for the DVC decoding process. Initially, we show that the scalable DVC approach is codec-independent, which means that it is independent from the method used to encode the base layer. Moreover, the influence of the base layer quality on the overall performance of the schemes is studied. Finally, evaluation of the proposed schemes is performed in both cases, with and without transmission errors. The simulation results show that scalable DVC has a lower compression efficiency than conventional scalable coding (i.e. scalable video coding and JPEG2000 for video and image, respectively) in error-free conditions. On the other hand, the DVC-based schemes show better error resilience as they outperform conventional scalable coding in error-prone conditions. More specifically, the Rate Distortion (RD) performance of the proposed schemes for image coding is compared with respect to Reed Solomon (RS) protected JPEG2000. While the latter exhibits a cliff effect as its performance dramatically decreases after a certain error rate, the performance of the DVC-based schemes decreases in a steady way with error rate increase.     

Joint source-channel coding for wireless object-based video communications utilizing data hiding.

In recent years, joint source-channel coding for multimedia communications has gained increased popularity. However, very limited work has been conducted to address the problem of joint source-channel coding for object-based video. In this paper, we propose a data hiding scheme that improves the error resilience of object-based video by adaptively embedding the shape and motion information into the texture data. Within a rate-distortion theoretical framework, the source coding, channel coding, data embedding, and decoder error concealment are jointly optimized based on knowledge of the transmission channel conditions. Our goal is to achieve the best video quality as expressed by the minimum total expected distortion. The optimization problem is solved using Lagrangian relaxation and dynamic programming. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested using simulations of a Rayleigh-fading wireless channel, and the algorithm is implemented based on the MPEG-4 verification model. Experimental results indicate that the proposed hybrid source-channel coding scheme significantly outperforms methods without data hiding or unequal error protection.     

Low bit-rate video coding using wavelet vector quantisation

A method for low bit-rate video coding based on wavelet vector quantisation is proposed. Motion estimation/compensation using overlapped block matching (OBM) is employed to eliminate the blocking effects in the prediction error introduced by conventional block matching. It is shown that OBM significantly increases the efficiency of the wavelet transform coder. The motion-compensated interframe prediction error is decomposed using a wavelet transform and a method is employed for the efficient coding of the wavelet coefficients. In this technique, the coefficients are coded with a zero-tree multistage lattice vector quantiser. Simulation results are provided to evaluate the coding performance of the described coding scheme for low bit-rate video coding. It provides constant bit rate, obviating the need for buffer, with just small fluctuations in PSNR. Moreover, comparison with the RM8 implementation of the standard H261 video coder shows that the presented codec provides improvements in both peak signal-to-noise ratio and picture quality     

Cross-band noise model refinement for transform domain Wyner-Ziv video coding

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a new video coding paradigm, which mainly exploits the source statistics at the decoder based on the availability of decoder side information. One approach to DVC is feedback channel based Transform Domain Wyner-Ziv (TDWZ) video coding. The efficiency of current TDWZ video coding trails that of conventional video coding solutions, mainly due to the quality of side information, inaccurate noise modeling and loss in the final coding step. The major goal of this paper is to enhance the accuracy of the noise modeling, which is one of the most important aspects influencing the coding performance of DVC. A TDWZ video decoder with a novel cross-band based adaptive noise model is proposed, and a noise residue refinement scheme is introduced to successively update the estimated noise residue for noise modeling after each bit-plane. Experimental results show that the proposed noise model and noise residue refinement scheme can improve the rate-distortion (RD) performance of TDWZ video coding significantly. The quality of the side information modeling is also evaluated by a measure of the ideal code length.     

Rate-distortion optimal video transport over IP allowing packets with bit errors.

We propose new models and methods for rate-distortion (RD) optimal video delivery over IP, when packets with bit errors are also delivered. In particular, we propose RD optimal methods for slicing and unequal error protection (UEP) of packets over IP allowing transmission of packets with bit errors. The proposed framework can be employed in a classical independent-layer transport model for optimal slicing, as well as in a cross-layer transport model for optimal slicing and UEP, where the forward error correction (FEC) coding is performed at the link layer, but the application controls the FEC code rate with the constraint that a given IP packet is subject to constant channel protection. The proposed method uses a novel dynamic programming approach to determine the optimal slicing and UEP configuration for each video frame in a practical manner, that is compliant with the AVC/H.264 standard. We also propose new rate and distortion estimation techniques at the encoder side in order to efficiently evaluate the objective function for a slice configuration. The cross-layer formulation option effectively determines which regions of a frame should be protected better; hence, it can be considered as a spatial UEP scheme. We successfully demonstrate, by means of experimental results, that each component of the proposed system provides significant gains, up to 2.0 dB, compared to competitive methods.     

A new approach to DVC combined with ROI extraction and residual video coding for multimedia sensor networks

The Wyner-Ziv distributed video coding scheme is characterized for its intraframe encoder and interframe decoder which can also approach the efficiency of an interframe encoder-decoder system. In Wyner-Ziv residual coding of video, the residual of a frame with respect to a reference frame is Wyner-Ziv encoded, which can reduces the input entropy and leads to a higher coding efficiency than directly encoding the original frame. In this paper, we propose a new approach of residual coding combined with Region Of Interest (ROI) extraction. Experimental results show that, the proposed scheme achieves better rate-distortion performance compared to conventional Wyner-Ziv coding scheme.     

基于H.264误差漂移补偿的鲁棒性视频水印算法

针对现有基于H.264的视频水印算法存在误差漂移的问题,在分析了误差漂移产生原因的基础上,提出了一种抑制误差漂移的鲁棒性视频水印新算法.通过调制H.264编码中Ⅰ帧量化后的4 ×4 DCT系数来实现水印的嵌入,并对帧内预测量化后满足特定条件的DCT子块的最后一行、列进行补偿和对帧间预测进行补偿,有效地抑制了帧内、帧间误差漂移.另外,该算法结合CAVLC编码来调制量化后的DCT残差系数,使整体码流变动较小,并且算法能够根据不同视频序列自适应地调节嵌入容量及嵌入位置,具有较好的灵活性和鲁棒性.在水印提取过程中,不需要原始视频的参与,即可实现盲提取.仿真实验结果表明,该算法在具有良好不可见性的前提下,对压缩码率影响较小,能够较好地抵抗噪声、帧剪切、重编码等攻击.     

Comparison of video protection methods for wireless networks

An experimental comparison of video protection methods targeted for wireless networks is presented. Basic methods are the data partitioning, reversible variable length coding, and macroblock row interleaving as well as macroblock scattering for packet loss protection. An implementation is described, in which scalable video is protected unequally with forward error correcting codes and retransmissions. Comparisons are performed for simulated wideband code division multiple access channel, and measurements are carried out with wireless local area network, Bluetooth as well as with GSM high speed circuit switched data. For the measurements, point-to-point connections are used. The achieved video quality is examined in our real-time wireless video demonstrator. The performance is measured with peak-signal-to-noise-ratio of received video, data overhead, communication delay, number of lost video frames, and decoding frame rate. Results show that the quality of decoded video can be improved by 1 dB with transparent connections compared to connections designed for general packet data. As a conclusion, a video coding subsystem must have access to the error control in a wireless link for the best quality in varying conditions.     

An error resilient video coding and transmission solution over error-prone channels

With the rapid development of network and multimedia technology, the error control in video coding and video transmission over error-prone channels has become increasingly important. The DCT based predictive coding and VLC based entropy coding greatly increase the coding efficiency, but make the compressed video stream very sensitive to transmission errors. Therefore, this paper proposes a reliable error resilient video coding and video transmission framework. In order to improve the robustness to packet loss errors, an error resilient video coding algorithm named Z-FMO is proposed. Some channel may bring random bit errors, an adaptive error concealment algorithm based on macroblock boundary gradient namely ECMBG is proposed aiming at such problem. As the indispensable part of a video transmission system, we implement an adaptive video transmission control algorithm JCBAF. Experimental results show that the proposed framework performs well both in R-D performance and subjective quality.