Partial frame content scrambling in H.264/AVC by information hiding

A partial frame content scrambling scheme for H.264/AVC compressed videos is proposed in this research. Some areas of video frames, which are identified as sensitive or privacy regions, will be scrambled to become unintelligible for restricting the access from general public or regular users. The scrambling is achieved by directly modifying or removing the selected data in the H.264/AVC bitstream, which will be embedded and transmitted along with the video via the information hiding technique. The authorized users are able to restore these regions by retrieving the hidden data. The design principle of the proposed scheme is to ensure that the scrambled regions are unrecognizable and can be recovered while other parts are still viewable without being affected much. In addition, the size of video stream has to be maintained reasonably well for fulfilling the requirements of related applications. Experimental results will show the feasibility of the proposed scheme.