An Optimal Selective Protection Scheme for Scalable Video Coding

The fundamental problem of selective protection scheme for encoded bitstreams is to find an efficient algorithm to select the set of frames required to be encrypted that can maximize protection effect with the minimum amount of protected data is required. In this paper, we propose an optimal selective protection scheme for SVC bitstreams by protecting the best combination of frames for selective protection in the sense that the amount of data required for protection is minimized and the resulting visual quality degradation is maximized. The selection of the frames to be encrypted is done by first expressing R-Q (protection rate - visual quality) relationship with Lagragian cost model. The experimental results show that, compared to protecting SVC bitstreams layer by layer, the proposed scheme gives superior performance in terms of protection effectiveness due to its better selection of frames for protection given protection bit budgets.