H.265/HEVC Video Steganalysis Based on CU Block Structure Gradients and IPM Mapping

Existing H.265/HEVC video steganalysis research mainly focuses on statistical feature modeling at the levels of motion vectors (MV), intra prediction modes (IPM), or transform coefficients. In contrast, studies targeting the coding-structure level - especially the analysis of block-level steganographic behaviors in Coding Units (CUs) - remain at an early stage. As a core component of H.265/HEVC coding decisions, the CU partition structure often exhibits steganographic perturbations in the form of structural changes and reorganization of prediction relationships, which are difficult to characterize effectively using traditional pixel-domain features or mode statistics. To address this issue, this paper, for the first time from the perspective of CU block-level steganalysis, proposes an H.265/HEVC video steganalysis method based on CU block-structure gradients and intra prediction mode mapping. The proposed method constructs a CU block-structure gradient map to explicitly describe changes in coding-unit partitioning, and combines it with a block-level mapping representation of IPM to jointly model the structural perturbations introduced by CU-level steganographic embedding. On this basis, we design a Transformer network, GradIPMFormer, tailored for CU-block steganalysis, thereby effectively enhancing the capability to perceive CU-level steganographic behaviors. Experimental results show that under different quantization parameters and resolution settings, the proposed method consistently achieves superior detection performance across multiple H.265/HEVC steganographic algorithms, validating the feasibility and effectiveness of conducting video steganalysis from the coding-structure perspective. This study provides a new CU block-level analysis paradigm for H.265/HEVC video steganalysis and has significant research value for covert communication security detection.

A Visual Perception-Based Tunable Framework and Evaluation Benchmark for H.265/HEVC ROI Encryption

ROI selective encryption, as an efficient privacy protection technique, encrypts only the key regions in the video, thereby ensuring security while minimizing the impact on coding efficiency. However, existing ROI-based video encryption methods suffer from insufficient flexibility and lack of a unified evaluation system. To address these issues, we propose a visual perception-based tunable framework and evaluation benchmark for H.265/HEVC ROI encryption. Our scheme introduces three key contributions: 1) A ROI region recognition module based on visual perception network is proposed to accurately identify the ROI region in videos. 2) A three-level tunable encryption strategy is implemented while balancing security and real-time performance. 3) A unified ROI encryption evaluation benchmark is developed to provide a standardized quantitative platform for subsequent research. This triple strategy provides new solution and significant unified performance evaluation methods for ROI selective encryption field. Experimental results indicate that the proposed benchmark can comprehensively measure the performance of the ROI selective encryption. Compared to existing ROI encryption algorithms, our proposed enhanced and advanced level encryption exhibit superior performance in multiple performance metrics. In general, the proposed framework effectively meets the privacy protection requirements in H.265/HEVC and provides a reliable solution for secure and efficient processing of sensitive video content.