Layered Access Control for Mpeg-4 Fine Granularity Scalable Video

Definition

An encryption scheme enabling fine granularity scalable access control of multimedia with a single encrypted code stream.

When it comes to the transmission of video, it is often desired that the data is encoded in a scalable manner, i.e., various quality representations can be extracted from a single code stream. Traditional encryption method may destroy the scalability of the original code stream. Layered Access Control (LAC) for MPEG-4 Fine Granularity Scalable (FGS) video preserves scalabilities in a cipherstream, controls the access to each quality layer with different keys, and supports multiple access types (PSNR and bitrate) simultaneously [1]. This provides support for business models in which a consumer pays according to the quality of service he or she requests. PSNR layers are usually used for quality-based access such as local play, while bitrate layers are used for streaming and other applications where bandwidth constraints are of a major concern.

PSNR layers...