Selective face encryption in H.264 encoded videos

Video surveillance is becoming increasingly common, but raises serious questions related to data confidentiality and privacy issues. In order to address these issues, several approaches for selective video encryption have been proposed within recent years: They aim at encrypting specific video regions, while keeping the remaining video unencrypted for analysis purposes. This paper describes a new system for selective H.264 video encryption which, in contrast to other approaches, individually encrypts and decrypts several regions in the video, uses a well-accepted encryption standard, and allows playback of the partially encrypted videos using standard H.264 decoders.