Detection of double compression in HEVC videos based on TU size and quantised DCT coefficients

Abstract

With the advent of sophisticated and low-cost video editing software, digital videos are highly vulnerable to be tampered. The authenticity and integrity identification of digital videos is an urgent issue. In this study, an effective method to detect double High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression with different quantisation parameter (QP) is proposed, which often occurs in the video tampering process. First, the effects of QP on the distributions of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients and Transform Unit (TU) size are analysed. Then a feature set including 17 features is derived from quantised DCT coefficients and TU size. It can characterize the statistical differences between single and double compressed videos. Finally, the Library for Support Vector Machine classifier is exploited to identify whether a given HEVC video has been double compressed or not. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ detection method has a good comprehensive performance.