ASePPI, an Adaptive Scrambling enabling Privacy Protection and Intelligibility in H.264/AVC

International audience—The usage of video surveillance systems increases more and more every year and protecting people privacy becomes a serious concern. In this paper, we present ASePPI, an Adaptive Scrambling enabling Privacy Protection and Intelligibility. It operates in the DCT domain within the H.264 standard. For each residual block of the luminance channel inside the region of interest, we encrypt the coefficients. Whereas encrypted coefficients appear as noise in the protected image, the DC value is dedicated to restore some of the original information. Thus, the proposed approach automatically adapts the level of protection according to the resolution of the region of interest. Comparing to existing methods, our framework provides better privacy protection with some flexibilities on the appearance of the protected version yielding better visibility of the scene for monitoring. Moreover, the impact on the source coding stream is negligible. Indeed, the results demonstrate a slight decrease in the quality of the reconstructed images and a small percentage of bits overhead