Chain-of-Evidence in Secured Surveillance Videos using Steganography and Hashing

Video sharing from closed-circuit television video recording or in social media interaction requires self-authentication for responsible and reliable data sharing. Similarly, surveillance video recording is a powerful method of deterring unlawful activities. A Solution-by-Design can be helpful in terms of making a captured video immutable, as such recordings cannot become a piece of evidence until proven to be unaltered. This paper presents a computationally inexpensive method of preserving a chain-of-evidence in surveillance videos using steganography and hashing. The method conforms to the data protection regulations which are increasingly adopted by governments, and is applicable to network edge storage. Security credentials are stored in a hardware wallet independently of the video capture device itself, while evidential information is stored within video frames themselves, independently of the content. The proposed method has turned out to not only preserve the integrity of the stored video data but also results in very limited degradation of the video data due to steganography. Despite the presence of steganographic information, video frames are still available for common image processing tasks such as tracking and classification.