Lightweight authentication for MP4 format container using subtitle track

Abstract

With massive utilization of video in every aspect of our daily lives, managing videos is crucial and demanding. The rich literature of data embedding has proven its viability in managing as well as enriching videos and other multimedia contents, but conventional methods are designed to operate in the media/compression layer. In this work, the synchronization between the audio-video and subtitle tracks within an MP4 format container is manipulated to insert data. Specifically, the data are derived from the statistics of the audio samples and video frames, and it serves as the authentication data for verification purpose. When needed, the inserted authentication data can be extracted and compared against the information computed from the received audio samples and video frames. The proposed method is lightweight because simple statistics, i.e., '0' and '1' at the bit stream level, are treated as the authentication data. Furthermore, unlike conventional MP4 container format-based data insertion technique, the bit stream size remains unchanged before and after data insertion using the proposed method. The proposed authentication method can also be deployed for joint utilization with any existing authentication technique for audio / video as long as these media can be multiplexed into a single bit stream and contained within an MP4 container. Experiments are carried out to verify the basic functionality of the proposed technique as an authentication method.