Hard Authentication of H.264 Video Applying MPEG-21 Generic Bitstream Syntax Description (gBSD)

While trivial research has been conducted in watermarking and authentication of H.264 video in recent years, most techniques require cascaded operations within a video adaptation scenario. In this paper, we propose an authentication scheme for adapted H.264 video content to detect integrity at the receiver´s side without the need for cascaded operations. The proposed scheme utilizes MPEG-21 gBSD for hard authentication of H.264 video in the compressed domain and does not necessitate any cascaded decompression and recompression. The design uses content-based authentication which is derived from a hash value. The authentication data is embedded as a fragile watermark, and the marking space is selected during the adaptation process of the H.264 video by parsing the gBSD. The authentication information is embedded in already encoded videos during adaptation. Proof of concept and performance evaluation is also presented.