Efficient selective encryption with H.264/SVC CABAC bin-strings

The distribution of copyrighted scalable video content to differing digital devices should be protected during rendering and transmission. The proposed scheme is applied to H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) CABAC bin-strings in a compression-friendly and decoder format compliant manner. It achieves this by careful selection of the entropy coder syntax elements for selective encryption (SE) with respect to SVC. Tests show that: decoding delay is small, replacement and key substitution attacks are fruitless; there is no increase in bitrate; and the stream remains format compliant. The proposed SE scheme is extremely suitable for video distribution to users who have subscribed to differing video qualities on medium- to high-computationally capable digital devices.