Securing Multimedia Content Using Joint Compression and Encryption

Algorithmic parameterization and hardware architectures can ensure secure transmission of multimedia data in resource-constrained environments such as wireless video surveillance networks, telemedicine frameworks for distant health care support in rural areas, and Internet video streaming. Joint multimedia compression and encryption techniques can significantly reduce the computational requirements of video processing systems. The authors present an approach to reduce the computational cost of multimedia encryption while also preserving the properties of compressed video. A hardware-amenable design of the proposed algorithms makes them suitable for real-time embedded multimedia systems. This approach alleviates the need for additional hardware for encryption in resource-constrained scenarios and can be otherwise used to augment existing encryption methods used for content delivery on the Internet or in other applications. This work shows how two compression blocks for video coding--a modified frequency transform (called a secure wavelet transform or SWT) and a modified entropy coding scheme (called a chaotic arithmetic coding or CAC)--can be used for video encryption. Experimental results are shown for selective encryption using the proposed schemes.