An HEVC compressed domain content-based video signature for copy detection and video retrieval

Abstract

Video sharing platforms and social networks have been growing very rapidly for the past few years. The rapid increase in the amount of video content introduces many challenges in terms of copyright violation detection and video search and retrieval. Generating and matching content-based video signatures, or fingerprints, is an effective method to detect copies or "near-duplicate" videos. Video signatures should be robust to changes in the video features used to characterize the signature caused by common signal processing operations. Recent work has focused on generating video signatures based on the uncompressed domain. However, decompression is a computationally intensive operation. In large video databases, it becomes advantageous to create robust signatures directly from the compressed domain. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been recently ratified as the latest video coding standard and wide spread adoption is anticipated. We propose a method in which a content-based video signature is generated directly from the HEVC-coded bitstream. Motion vectors from the HEVC-coded bitstream are used as the features. A robust hashing function based on projection on random matrices is used to generate the hashing bits. A sequence of these bits serves as the signature for the video. Our experimental results show that our proposed method generates a signature robust to common signal processing techniques such as resolution scaling, brightness scaling and compression.