Restricted H.264/AVC video coding for privacy protected video scrambling

The issue of personal privacy has garnered significant attention with the extensive application of video surveillance systems. Privacy region scrambling is an effective method to protect privacy in video. To ensure that nonprivacy regions are not affected by scrambling, particular methods must be taken to prevent drift error in privacy protected video scrambling. However, existing methods have significantly reduced the coding efficiency. In this paper, we focus on improving coding efficiency while preventing drift error in privacy protected H.264/AVC video scrambling, which is the state-of-the-art coding standard. A restricted video coding scheme is proposed, which involves three parts of Mode Restricted Intra Prediction (MRIP), Search Window Restricted Motion Estimation (SWRME) and Boundary Strength Restricted Deblocking Filtering (BSRDF). Experimental results show that the proposed restricted video coding scheme prevents drift error with higher coding efficiency than others.