Detection of Transcoding from H.264/AVC to HEVC Based on CU and PU Partition Types

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a worldwide popular video coding standard due to its high coding efficiency. To make profits, forgers prefer to transcode videos from previous standards such as H.264/AVC to HEVC. To deal with this issue, an efficient method is proposed to expose such transcoded HEVC videos based on coding unit (CU) and prediction unit (PU) partition types. CU and PU partitioning are two unique syntactic units of HEVC that can reflect a video’s compression history. In this paper, CU and PU partition types of I pictures and P pictures are firstly extracted. Then, their mean frequencies are calculated and concatenated as distinguishing features, which are further sent to a support vector machine (SVM) for classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method can identify transcoded HEVC videos with high accuracy and has strong robustness against frame-deletion and shifted Group of Pictures (GOP) structure attacks.