Slice groups for post-compression region of interest encryption in H.264/AVC and its scalable extension

•For medium and high bit rates, slice groups reduce drift with low overhead.•The introduced all-grey base layer simplifies encryption by avoiding drift.•Containing inter-layer drift can be reduced to containing temporal drift.

Encrypting regions of interest in H.264/AVC and SVC bit streams after compression is a challenging task due to drift. In this paper, we assess whether the use of slice groups makes this task easier and what its expense in terms of bit rate overhead is. We introduce the concept of all-grey base layers for SVC which simplify the encryption of regions of interest in surveillance camera applications while obeying all standard-imposed base layer restrictions. Furthermore, we show that the use of slice groups is possible with relatively low overhead for medium and high bit rates (below 5% in most of the tested configurations). This applies to H.264/AVC as well as SVC bit streams with two and three spatial layers, including those with the newly introduced all-grey base layers. Although we are able to contain spatial and inter-layer drift with our proposed encryption setup, temporal drift still remains an issue that cannot be solved by sole usage of slice groups.