Partial encryption of digital contents using face detection algorithm

Recently, a great number of people can share the same digital contents, because it is possible to copy and to transmit of the digital contents easy and fast. These properties of the digital contents are causes of that reduce the will to creation of makers and that hamper industrial development. Therefore recent studies focus on the protection of digital contents. However it is not efficient that traditional encryption algorithms apply to the digital image/video contents, because of the long encryption time. To solve this problem, recent studies use the partial encryption algorithm that encrypts some parts of the image or the video frame. However there are still problems which features do not have the semantic information, because previous studies extract the features for reducing the encryption time. In this paper, we proposed the partial encryption method using the face region as the feature because the face has the semantic information and is the most important part in the digital content, especially the video contents. As shown by experimental results, the proposed method can reduce the encryption time and can improve the protection strength using the traditional encryption algorithms for the digital contents.