數位影音被廣泛使用於各種傳播媒體，對於畫面中的個人隱私保護成為一項重要議題。本論文提出了一個作用於H.264/AVC視訊壓縮架構上的隱私權保護機制，我們對於欲保密區域的資料進行擾亂，使得隱私區域在一般使用者面前是模糊而無法被正常觀看的，只有合法授權者能將畫面還原成原始影像。 我們擾亂的方式是去修改H.264/AVC視訊編碼串流中的資料，使得解碼端得到錯誤資訊產生擾亂的效果，最後再將原始資料利用資料隱藏的方式嵌入於視訊串流中，以讓合法授權的接收者藉由取出資料而確實還原隱私畫面。由於H.264/AVC編碼利用空間與時間的相依性以獲得良好的壓縮效果，當我們實作區域性擾亂時，會因漂移誤差(drift error)的產生，造成非保密區域的畫面也受到影響。為了解決此一問題，本研究採取限制編碼的方式，藉由限制H.264/AVC編碼過程中的畫面預測，有效解決飄移誤差的發生。 實驗結果顯示本方法能確實擾亂隱私區域，使畫面模糊讓人眼看不清楚，授權的接收者能確實還原畫面，達到個人隱私權的保護，而且整體視訊的資料量能獲得控制，以符合各種相關的視訊應用。Protecting personal privacy on digital images and videos is important these days. In this research, we present a privacy protection mechanism in H.264/AVC videos. The private visual information on video frames is scrambled by processing the data in the compressed bitstream directly so that the private region is not visible to the regular users. Nevertheless, the scrambled region can be restored to the original content by authorized users. Basically, the scrambling is applied by extracting and removing some data from the H.264/AVC bitstream. These data will be embedded into the bitstream so that the recovery can be applied successfully by placing these data back. In other words, the de-scrambling is achieved via the methodology of information hiding. Since the H.264/AVC encoder makes use of the spatial and temporal dependency for reducing the data size, careless partial scrambling on H.264/AVC compressed bit-stream will result in the drift errors. To solve this problem, the restricted H.264/AVC encoding is employed to prevent the modified data from affecting the subsequent video content. Experimental results show that our method can effectively scramble the privacy region, which can be recovered by using the hidden information. In addition, the size of partially scrambled video is kept under good control.
