Abstract:
Versatile video coding (VVC) is the next generation video coding standard developed by the joint
video experts team (JVET) and released in July 2020. VVC introduces several new coding tools
providing a significant coding gain over the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. It is well
known that increasing the coding efficiency adds more dependencies in the video bitstream making
format-compliant encryption with the standard more challenging. In this paper we tackle the problem
of selective encryption of the VVC standard in format-compliant and constant bitrate. These two
constraints ensure that the encrypted bitstream can be decoded by any VVC decoder while the bitrate
remains unchanged by the encryption. The selective encryption of all possible VVC syntax elements
is investigated. A new algorithm is proposed to encrypt in format-compliant and constant bitrate the
transform coefficients (TCs) together with other syntax elements at the level of the entropy encoder.
The proposed solution was integrated and assessed under the VVC reference software model version
6.0. Experimental results showed that the encryption drastically decreases the video quality while the
encryption is robust against several types of attacks. The encryption space is estimated in the range
of 15% to 26% of the bitstream size resulting in a lightweight encryption process. The web page of
this work is available at https://gugautie.github.io/sevvc/.
