Accuracy of a High-Level, Loss-Tolerant Video Fingerprint for Surveillance Authentication

There are cases where surveillance video must be transmitted in the clear, which is without encryption, such as when multiple public safety agencies use the same video feeds. To ensure trust of the received video, it must be authenticated. While lossless video is straightforward to authenticate by cryptographic means, lossy video as may result from UDP, wireless, or transcoded transmissions, is more difficult to authenticate. We describe a method that combines a concise and efficiently computed video fingerprint with public key cryptography to enable lossy video authentication. Experimental results show how video fingerprint length relates to successful authentication rate and latency of its calculation.