Preserving Chain-of-Evidence in Surveillance Videos for Authentication and Trust-Enabled Sharing

Abstract

Surveillance video recording is a powerful method of deterring unlawful activities. A robust data protection-by-design solution can be helpful in terms of making a captured video immutable, as such recordings cannot become a piece of evidence until proven to be unaltered. Similarly, video sharing from closed-circuit television video recording or in social media interaction requires self-authentication for responsible and reliable data sharing. This article presents a computationally inexpensive method of preserving a chain-of-evidence in surveillance videos by means of hashing and steganography. The method conforms to the data protection regulations, which are increasingly adopted by governments, and is applicable to network edge storage. Encryption keys are stored in a hardware wallet independently of the video capture device itself, while evidential information is stored steganographically within video frames themselves, independently of the content. Added protection is provided by hiding information within the two least-valued of pixel bitplanes, using a newly introduced technique that randomizes the pixel storage locations on a per video frame and video-capture device basis. Overall, the proposed method has turned out to not only preserve the integrity of stored video data but also results in minimal degradation of the video data resulting from steganography. Despite the inclusion of hidden information, video frames will still be available for common image-processing tasks such as tracking and classification, as their objective video quality is almost unchanged.

SLEPX: An Efficient Lightweight Cipher for Visual Protection of Scalable HEVC Extension

“…The need for video encryption continues to grow, especially for real-time applications such as video surveillance, as was indicated in Section I's initial discussion of video encryption applications. Such surveillance is close to becoming a necessity [78], not just within obvious venues such as airports and railways but within many private houses and business premises, especially in countries where political unrest exists. Developments such as classification of objects within video frames and the intelligent tracking of those objects thereafter has increased the desirability of such surveillance.…”