Detection of Double AVC/HEVC Encoding

New generation video codecs are designed to improve coding efficiency with respect to previous standards and to support the latest hardware and applications. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor of Advanced Video Coding (AVC), which is by far the most adopted standard worldwide. To promote the new standard, producers are re-releasing recent movies in HEVC format. In such a scenario, a fraudulent provider that does not own the original uncompressed data could sell old, lower quality AVC content re-encoded as if it were natively HEVC. Furthermore, with several hundred hours of video content uploaded every minute, it is not unlikely that re-edited low quality clips are labelled as HEVC to increase popularity and revenues from advertising. We tackle with these and similar issues by proposing a forensic technique to detect whether a HEVC sequence was obtained from an uncompressed sequence or by re-encoding an existing AVC sequence.