Encryption for high efficiency video coding with video adaptation capabilities.

Video encryption techniques enable applications like digital rights management and video scrambling. Applying encryption on the entire video stream can be computationally costly and prevents advanced video modifications by an untrusted middlebox in the network, like splicing, quality monitoring, watermarking, and transcoding. Therefore, encryption techniques are proposed which influence a small amount of the video stream while keeping the video compliant with its compression standard, High Efficiency Video Coding. Encryption while guaranteeing standard compliance can cause degraded compression efficiency, so depending on their bitrate impact, a selection of encrypted syntax elements should be made. Each element also impacts the quality for untrusted decoders differently, so this aspect should also be considered. In this paper, multiple techniques for partial video encryption are investigated, most of them having a low impact on rate-distortion performance and having a broad range in scrambling performance.