A Hybrid Scheme for Authenticating Scalable Video Codestreams

A scalable video coding (SVC) codestream consists of one base layer and possibly several enhancement layers. The base layer, which contains the lowest quality and resolution images, is the foundation of the SVC codestream and must be delivered to recipients, whereas enhancement layers contain richer contour/texture of images in order to supplement the base layer in resolution, quality, and temporal scalabilities. This paper presents a novel hybrid authentication (HAU) scheme. The HAU employs both cryptographic authentication and content-based authentication techniques to ensure integrity and authenticity of the SVC codestreams. Our analysis and experimental results indicate that the HAU is able to detect malicious manipulations and locate the tampered image regions while is robust to content-preserving manipulations for enhancement layers. Although our focus in this paper is on authenticating H.264/SVC codestreams, the proposed technique is also applicable to authenticate other scalable multimedia contents such as MPEG-4 fine grain scalability and JPEG2000 codestreams.