IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO.
1, JANUARY 2012 67
VSYNC: Bandwidth-Efficient and
Distortion-Tolerant Video File Synchronization
Hao Zhang, Member, IEEE, Chuohao Yeo, and Kannan Ramchandran, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractWe introduce video-sync (VSYNC), a video file
synchronization system that efficiently uses a bidirectional com-
munications link to maintain up-to-date video sources at remote
ends to a desired resolution and distortion level. By automatically
detecting and transmitting only the differences between video
files, VSYNC is able to avoid unnecessary re-transmission of
the entire video when there are only minor differences between
video copies. A hierarchical hashing scheme is designed to allow
synchronization to within some user-defined distortion, while be-
ing rate-efficient and computationally tractable. Distributed video
coding is used to realize further rate savings when transmitting
video updates. VSYNC is bandwidth-efficient and is useful in
many scenarios including video backup, video sharing, and video
authentication applications. Experimental results show that rate-
savings ranging from 2 to 10 can be obtained by VSYNC
with about 10% of the frames being edited, compared to re-
transmitting the compressed video or using a file synchronization
utility such as rsync.
Index Termsrsync, video coding, video file synchronization,
video hash, VSYNC.
I. Introduction
P ROLIFERATION of video content continues to severely
burden the Internet. It has been estimated that video
will dominate more than 60% of the entire consumer Internet
traffic by 2013 [1]. However, much video content information
that is transmitted may be redundant, since many copies of
the same video exist on many different places or even on
the same server. Oftentimes, these different versions have
only minor differences, e.g., due to typical edits including
deletion/insertion, rearrangement, and/or transcoding. Clearly,
completely retransmitting a similar video wastes bandwidth,
and it would be desirable to have an automatic scheme that
can detect and transmit just the differences.
There are many general file synchronization tools that are
used to maintain the same file on two or more remote locations
while aiming to minimize communication bandwidth. Such
tools include rsync [2] and zsync [3], which are open-source
Manuscript received October 5, 2010; revised February 8, 2011, April 15,
2011 and April 26, 2011; accepted April 27, 2011. Date of publication June 2,
2011; date of current version January 6, 2012. This paper was recommended
by Associate Editor B. Yan.
H. Zhang and K. Ramchandran are with the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berke-
ley, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA (e-mail: zhanghao@eecs.berkeley.edu; kan-
nanr@eecs.berkeley.edu).
C. Yeo is with the Department of Signal Processing, Institute for Infocomm
Research, 138632, Singapore (e-mail: zuohao@eecs.berkeley.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSVT.2011.2158336
1051-8215/$26.00 
utilities in the Unix/Linux operating systems. These conven-
tional utilities are efficient in reducing the bandwidth for
exact bit-level synchronization of general data files. However,
video files with the same content may be stored in different
bitstream formats on different locations, and when sent over
the network may be encoded in various ways in order to reduce
transmission redundancy as well as to meet the receivers de-
vice characteristics. Therefore, these standard synchronization
protocols are unsuitable for video data because they fail to
capture similarity at the content level.
This motivates us to investigate protocols that can patch
and update the differences between video files, which we
call video synchronization. There can be multiple versions
of similar video sources that users wish to synchronize to
a single version. Different videos might also have different
video parameters such as resolution and quality. This calls for
a protocol that is video-centric and that can synchronize video
files to satisfy predefined distortion constraints. In this paper,
we introduce video-sync (VSYNC), a video-centric video file
synchronization protocol that can detect and send the changes
in an automated fashion.
Video file synchronization has a wide range of applications,
including video file sharing, video data backup, online video
editing, and video forensics. Consider the following use cases.
1) A marketing professional at a company headquarters
prepares a product demo video and sends an MPEG-
compressed version of it to some decision makers in
other company offices around the world. He later does
some minor editing to the original video according to
the committees discussions, and wants to update ev-
erybodys copy at hand. Retransmitting the entire video
file which has only small changes is both expensive and
unnecessary, especially in situations where the video file
is large and the communication cost is high.
2) It may be desirable to allow mobile devices to always
have access to the most recent copy of video files
located on a remote server, in a similar fashion to the
Sync function in Windows Media Player [4] which
is designed for local and exact bit-level synchronization
where bandwidth is not a concern. However, minimizing
transmission rate is of particular interest when there
are tight bandwidth constraints, such as over wireless
networks.
3) In video authentication, subscribers may want to find
out if their copies of rented or purchased video have
been tampered with and if so, would want to detect,
c 2011 IEEE
68 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
Fig. 1. Typical VSYNC application setup. Initially, users U1 and U2 , respec-
tively, have video files Vorig and Vupd , which can be similar in content. User
U1 then wants to synchronize his/her video to Vupd at a specified resolution
and quality to get V upd . Bidirectional communications is present, and the goal
is to minimize the total transmission rate R1 +R2 while satisfying the required
distortion constraint between Vupd and V upd .
identify, and fix the tampered content using minimum
transmission overhead.
In all of the above cases, the videos on the two ends of
the communication link need not have the same resolution
or encoding scheme. It would be highly desirable to have a
protocol that automatically detects the changes and synchro-
nizes the video files under a user-defined distortion constraint
while using minimal data transfer bandwidth, taking advantage
of the fact that both parties already have some version of the
video data.
It is worth noting that no assumption has been made about
the book-keeping of the modification history of one video
file with respect to another similar video file. In practice, such
book-keeping may not always be available or feasible. For
example, in video authentication, the history of changes of
the tampered content is usually not available nor reversible.
In video editing, different users may also have different
video editing software which makes book-keeping difficult.
It is desirable to design a tool that can automatically detect
and update the differences without knowledge of what the
differences are.
A. Problem Setup
To formulate the problem setup, a two-user case with
grayscale videos is considered as shown in Fig. 1. We will
use this setup for clarity of exposition in this paper, although
it can be easily extended to synchronization among multiple
users with color videos in a distributed fashion. Consider user
U1 , who has video Vorig , and wants to synchronize with user
U2 who has video Vupd , to get video V upd . In general, Vorig ,
Vupd , and V upd may have different resolution and quality,
and the goal is to obtain V upd at the desired resolution and
quality given Vorig and Vupd using minimal total transmission
rate R1 + R2 . The same notation in this setup will be used
throughout the paper unless stated otherwise.
B. Contributions
In this paper, a novel video synchronization protocol
VSYNC is described for the setup depicted in Fig. 1. The
major contributions of VSYNC are: 1) it can automatically
synchronize videos to within some targeted distortion con-
straint, e.g., mean-squared-error (MSE), with high probability,
without prior knowledge of the differences between videos;
2) our use of hierarchical hashes to verify the synchronization,
where the hash rate threshold can be systematically and rigor-
ously determined as a function of the targeted distortion; and
3) the system is invariant to the choice of resolution or codec
choice, i.e., it can synchronize video sources encoded with
different encoding parameters. To the best of our knowledge,
this paper is the first attempt to address the synchronization
problem for video data.
The idea of VSYNC was first introduced by Zhang et al. [5].
A distributed video coding (DVC) approach is proposed to
further reduce the transmission rate in their later work [6].
The framework is then applied to performing synchroniza-
tion across heterogenous mobile platforms [7]. All of these
previous works assumed that the vectors of pixel values of
any underlying pairs of compared units, e.g., frames, have
the same l2 norm. Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) per-
formance can only be guaranteed when the variances (or
contrasts) of the underlying videos are normalized. In this
paper, we provide a holistic view of the VSYNC protocol and
complete the work by proposing solutions that guarantee the
PSNR performance even when such variances are different.
Experimental results show that compared to baseline meth-
ods, such as re-transmission using H.264 and synchronization
using rsync, VSYNC offers substantial transmission savings in
typical usage scenarios for various target distortion constraints.
The proposed system is offered as a promising candidate to
improve bandwidth efficiency in video file sharing, video file
back up, video authentication, and other related applications.
II. Related Work
A. Rsync and Zsync Protocols
We will use the notation introduced earlier in Fig. 1, except
that video data files are treated as general data files in these
protocols. When an update request is initiated using rsync,
user U1 splits the file Vorig into non-overlapping chunks of
fixed size, computes a weak hash and a strong hash for each
chunk and sends them to U2 over the communications link [2].
The weak hash is the Adler-32 rolling checksum and the strong
hash is the MD4 hash. User U2 then computes the weak hashes
for every overlapping chunk, i.e., chunks that overlap with
each other by a certain size (usually one byte), of the same
size in the updated file Vupd in a computationally efficient
manner by taking advantage of the recursive nature of the
Adler-32 checksum calculation, and compares them with the
weak hashes sent by user U1 as an initial check for matches.
U2 further verifies chunks matched by the weak hash check
by checking their MD4 hashes. U2 then sends the data in
Vupd that are not part of any chunk matches with Vorig along
with information on where to merge these blocks into the
recipients version to construct V upd . The bit-stream of V upd
will be identical to that of Vupd after the synchronization. zsync
works in a similar way, but the hash checks will be performed
by U1 instead of U2 [3].
It is worth noting that the hashes used in rsync and zsync are
generated on the bit-level of the file, thus a single bit change
within a chunk in the file will change its corresponding hash.
ZHANG et al.: VSYNC: BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT AND DISTORTION-TOLERANT VIDEO FILE SYNCHRONIZATION
Fig. 2. VSYNC Protocol. In step 1, user U1 generates weak hashes for the
GOFs and strong hashes for the MB tubes and sends them to user U2 . User
U2 verifies the hashes in step 2 and generates new content and assembly
instructions in step 3. In step 4, user U1 decodes the new content and
assembles the updated video.
When applied to synchronization of video files, such content-
agnostic approaches would be very inefficient.
B. Image and Video Hashing
There are various image and video hashing techniques in the
literature, many of which are designed for tampering detection.
Fridrich and Goljan [8] proposed a tampering detection
method that is robust to JPEG compression and additive noise.
Discrete cosine transform (DCT) blocks of an image are pro-
jected onto random vectors followed by adaptive thresholding
to get binary hashes. Roy and Sun [9] proposed an image hash
based on two parts. One part consists of quantized projections
of an images scale-invariant feature transform features onto
random hyperplanes. The other part consists of both the ori-
entation of the image and the block-wise histogram statistics.
Lin and Chang [10] proposed a hashing technique for image
authentication which can prevent malicious manipulations but
allow JPEG lossy compression. The authentication signature is
based on the invariance of the relationships between DCT co-
efficients at the same position in separate blocks of an image.
Lin et al. introduced a rate-efficient image tamper detection
technique [11] similar in spirit to a secure biometric hash
proposed by Draper et al. [12], where blocks of the query
image are projected onto random vectors and quantized, and
then syndrome encoded using a suitable low-density-parity-
check (LDPC) code [13], [14]. The syndromes and a cryp-
tographic hash of the quantized projections are sent over
the network. The same projections and cryptographic hashes
are also obtained of the original image, and the received
syndrome bits are decoded using the projections of the original
image as side information. If the decoding is successful and
the cryptographic hashes match, a successful match will be
declared. In Lins work [11], tolerable differences between the
original image and the query image are assumed to be due to
quantization errors, and the authors showed empirically that
the difference between the unquantized projection coefficients
follow a Gaussian distribution after compression. However, the
Gaussian assumption may break down after quantization, right
before LDPC coding is applied and therefore the thresholds
used need to be experimentally determined.
69
Fig. 3. Illustration of GOF and MB tube. A GOF is a consecutive series
of frames. An MB tube is a collection of co-located MBs within a GOF.
While the above-mentioned hashing algorithms are robust
to certain kinds of compression distortion and sensitive to
content-based visual attacks, their focus is on tamper detection
rather than file synchronization without accountability for
transmission efficiency. Furthermore, only empirical perfor-
mance of the hashing algorithms was given and no quantifiable
relationship between the similarity of hashes and that of the
underlying images/videos has been established.
Our work of VSYNC differs from previous works in several
aspects. First, VSYNC is a bidirectional protocol that aims
at synchronizing video files at remote ends in a rate-efficient
and computation-efficient manner, rather than detecting image
tampering. Second, a hierarchical hashing scheme is designed
to learn the differences and similarities between the video data,
which can be analytically quantified and mapped to the Ham-
ming distance between their respective hashes. Third, while
we use channel coding to reduce the hash rate, we also use
an extra MSE check after the channel code decoding process
to validate if the underlying content satisfies the required
distortion. This estimated MSE is then used to apply a DVC
approach to estimate and transmit the necessary additional
bits. This avoids unnecessary overhead and further improves
transmission efficiency.
III. System Overview
We first present an overview of the VSYNC system as
illustrated in Fig. 2. Define a group of frames (GOFs) as a
series of F frames. Each frame of size N1 by N2 is divided
into q by q macroblocks (MBs). Also define a MB tube as
the set of co-located MBs within a GOF, as shown in Fig. 3.
When an update request is initiated, both Vorig and Vupd are
first resized to the same resolution as V upd if necessary.1
In step 1 in Fig. 2, user U1 computes a weak hash of every
non-overlapping GOF of Vorig and a strong hash for each MB
tube across each GOF. In step 2, user U2 computes the weak
hash for every overlapping GOF of Vupd and compares it with
that sent by U1 , where the overlapping GOFs are GOFs that
overlap with each other by a fixed number of frames. Such
weak hash check helps locate for each GOF in Vorig all the pos-
sible matching GOFs in Vupd . Whenever the weak hash check
upd is 640480, and the original
1 For example, if the required resolution of V
resolution of Vorig and Vupd is 320 120 and 1280 960, respectively, then
Vorig should be upsampled by a factor of 2 and Vupd should be downsampled
by a factor of 2.
70 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
TABLE I
Key Notations
Notation Definition
Vorig Video to be updated
Vupd Destination (updated) video
F No. of frames in a GOF
N1 N2 Dimensions of a frame
qq Dimensions of an MB
v1 (v2 ) Sampled pixel values of GOF in Vorig (Vupd )
1 (2 ) Pixel values of MB tube in Vorig (Vupd )
Kw (Ks ) No. of projections for weak (strong) hash
w1 (w2 ) Weak hash of Vorig (Vupd )
s1 (s2 ) Strong hash of Vorig (Vupd )
s1e (s2e ) Encoded strong hash of Vorig (Vupd )
TM (TP ) Required MSE (PSNR) threshold
w (s ) Threshold angle for weak (strong) hash
pw (ps ) Threshold flipping probability for weak (strong) hash
R(ps ) Rate of LDPC code with parameter ps
Note: we use bold type to denote vectors.
is verified, U2 then verifies the match of the corresponding
GOF pairs by checking a strong hash of each corresponding
pair of MB tubes across the two GOFs, which helps detect
localized edits and avoid re-transmission of unmodified blocks.
In step 3, all the GOFs and MB tubes that do not pass both
hash checks are encoded using a suitable scheme discussed in
Section V. This together with the assembly instructions, i.e.,
information on where to merge these new data into the Vorig , is
transmitted to user U1 , who uses it to construct V upd , as shown
in step 4. The details of the hashing algorithms, new data
encoding schemes, and parameter configurations are presented
in the subsequent sections. Table I lists the key notations used
in this paper.
IV. Hierarchical Hashing Scheme
We apply a hierarchical hashing scheme, namely, a weak
hash check followed by a strong hash check, to find the
matches. The weak hash check is computationally efficient
and is used to quickly find candidate matches while the strong
hash check follows up on the candidate matches to verify each
match at the cost of more computations. This top-to-bottom
hierarchical hashing structure is used to provide a scalable way
to find matching content by trading off between accuracy and
complexity. In this section, we will first state the distortion
criteria used, and introduce the distance-preserving random
projections technique that is used as the basis of the weak and
strong hashes. Then, we will explain how the weak and strong
hashes are computed and checked.
A. Distortion Criteria
Unlike general file synchronization tools such as rsync and
zsync, VSYNC does not aim at maintaining exact copies
of the video data, but rather keeping the visual content to
within some user-defined distortion. In this paper, we use the
MSE (or PSNR) between the pixel values in videos as the
distortion criteria. Denote by TM the threshold in MSE, the
corresponding threshold for PSNR is TP = 20 log 255 TM
, where
255 is the largest pixel value of an 8-bit grayscaled video.
To quantify similarity, we say that if two content units of the
Fig. 4. Angle subtended by the rays from the origin to z1 and z2 can
be found using simple trigonometry to be arccos zz1z ,z2 
. If a hyperplane
1 2
orientation is chosen uniformly at random, then the probability of the
hyperplane separating z1 and z2 is just p = 1 arccos zz1z
,z2 
.
1 2
same length, e.g., the corresponding GOFs, frames or MBs
in Vorig and Vupd , are within the threshold TM in terms of
relative MSE of their pixel values (or within TP in terms of
their relative PSNR), then these two content units should pass
the similarity check and hence no re-transmission is needed
for synchronization; otherwise, the content units are said to
fail the similarity check and the corresponding content unit
in Vupd should be re-transmitted. Since the validation process
during synchronization is performed by hashing, it would be
desirable to control the maximum distortion of the target video
by adjusting the corresponding hash rate for a given threshold.
To achieve this, we will first introduce a random projections
idea studied by Yeo et al. [15] as follows.
B. Distance-Preserving Random Projection
Consider two n-dimensional vectors z1 and z2 , each pro-
jected onto K independent and identically distributed random
hyperplanes P1 , P2 , . . . , PK followed by 1-bit quantization
depending on the sign of the projected values to generate
K-bit binary hashes h(z1 ) and h(z2 ), respectively. Extending
the result of Yeo et al. [15], it can be shown that the
probability that z1 and z2 have different quantization bits for
each hyperplane is
1 z1 , z2 
p = arccos (1)
z1 z2 
where z1 , z2  is the inner-product between z1 and z2 . Fig. 4
illustrates this relationship graphically.
The Hamming distance dH (h(z1 ), h(z2 )) between the two
K-bit hashes h(z1 ) and h(z2 ) can be used to estimate the
flipping probability p with p = dH (h(zK1 ),h(z2 )) . An estimate of
the Euclidean distance between z1 and z2 is then given by

d E (z1 , z2 ) = z1 2 + z2 2 2z1 z2  cos (p).
(2)
The random projection approach provides a promising check-
sum for videos because it is distance-preserving. Using the
properties described above, we will be able to relate the MSE
and thus the PSNR of the content to the Hamming distance
between these binarized random projection hashes [16].
C. Weak Hash Check
The goal of the weak hash is to locate possible matching
GOFs in Vupd for every non-overlapping GOF in Vorig . The
hash needs to be fast to check, and has to have a small false
negative rate, i.e., the probability that two similar content units
will fail the weak hash check should be low. To achieve these
ZHANG et al.: VSYNC: BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT AND DISTORTION-TOLERANT VIDEO FILE SYNCHRONIZATION
Fig. 5. Demonstration of the choice of the thresholding angle for the weak
hash. Any vector that is within TM from vector v1 lies in the circle shown
in the figure. The vector in the circle that has the largest angle with respect
to v1 is the one that is tangent to the circle. If any vector v2 forms an angle
larger than w , it will be rejected.
goals, FN1 N2 pixels for each GOF are uniformly randomly
sub-sampled. The sub-sampling is done to reduce the compu-
tation complexity and the sampling fraction, denoted by f , can
be chosen to trade off between complexity and accuracy. The
sub-sampling can be coordinated between user U1 and user
U2 by some pre-agreed common pseudo-randomness on the
hash generation process for both the GOF and the MB tubes
within each GOF. Denote by v1 and v2 respectively the vector
of randomly sampled pixels of the GOFs in Vorig and Vupd ,
and by Nw = FN1 N2 f the number of sampled pixels. v1 and
v2 are then projected onto Kw random hyperplanes Pk RNw ,
k {1, . . . , Kw }. Each projected value is then quantized into
one bit depending on its sign. Denote by w1 and w2 the
vectors of the quantized values. To make the weak hash check
computationally light, only the Hamming distance dH (w1 , w2 )
between w1 and w2 is checked. The relationship between
dH (w1 , w2 ) and the distortion tolerance TM is discussed in
the sequel.
Following the idea used in (1), we know that the entries
in w1 and w2 will be either 0 or 1 and that each pair of
corresponding entry bits in the vectors, denoted by w1 [i] and
w2 [i], i = 1, 2, . . . , Kw , should have a probability of differing
v1 ,v2 
to be Pr(w1 [i] = w2 [i]) = 1 arccos
v1 v2 
, which can be estimated
dH (w1 ,w2 )
using Kw
.
Given v1 of length Nw , any vector that is within an MSE of
TM from it should lie within the circle of radius Nw TM as
shown in Fig. 5. The largest possible angle w that any vector
within the circle can have with respect to v1 is formed between
v1 and the vector that is tangent to the circle. It can be seen
that vectors that form an angle larger than w with respect
to v1 will fail the MSE requirement and therefore should not
pass the weak hash check. The threshold w can be obtained
as
Nw TM
w = arcsin . (3)
v1 
Since dH (wK1w,w2 ) provides a reasonably good estimate of the
flipping probability of any random hyperplane bisecting the
vectors v1 and v2 , we should let the corresponding two GOFs
pass the weak hash check if dH (wK1w,w2 ) < w , otherwise they
fail. One threshold w for each GOF will be piggy-backed in
the hash bits to be transmitted. Since only one threshold per
GOF is transmitted, the overhead is small.
In summary, the weak hash check works as follows. User
U1 , who wants to synchronize his/her video Vorig to Vupd up
71
to MSE distortion TM , will generate and transmit the weak
hash to user U2 . Specifically, for each non-overlapping GOF
in Vorig , a fraction f of all the pixels are randomly sampled
to get v1 . The l2 norm of v1 is computed and used with
TM to obtain the threshold angle w . The sampled values are
projected onto Kw random hyperplanes and quantized into 1 bit
depending on the sign of the projected values to get the weak
hash bits w1 . These hash bits and w are sent to U2 . User
U2 performs the same weak hash generation process to get w2
for the overlapping GOFs in Vupd , and computes the Hamming
distance dH (w1 , w2 ) between w1 and w2 to perform the weak
hash check.
D. Strong Hash Check
As was discussed in the previous section, it is desirable for
the weak hash to have a small false negative rate. Indeed, only
vectors that form angles larger than w will not pass the MSE
requirement. However, this nature also makes the weak hash
vulnerable in detecting other possibilities that violate the MSE
criteria, i.e., it can have a large false positive rate. For example,
those vectors that form an angle less than w but lie outside
the circle, as shown in Fig. 5, will not be rejected by the weak
hash check. Since the weak hash is generated by only a sub-
sampled set of the pixels, it is also possible that some changes
in certain areas cannot be detected. For example, if the only
difference between Vorig and Vupd is that Vupd has a logo across
the upper left corner of the entire video and the size of the
logo only accounts for a small fraction of the video frames,
then the weak hash is likely to miss it. Therefore, another hash
check that is able to detect such cases is needed to verify the
potential matches returned by the weak hash check.
With these guidelines in mind, we design the strong hash
to check on a finer granularity in the GOFs, i.e., on an MB
tube basis. To form the strong hash of an MB tube, all the
pixel values of each MB tube are formed into a vector which
is projected onto Ks random hyperplanes and are quantized
depending on its sign. Denote by 1 (2 ) the vectors of the
pixel values of the MB tube in Vorig (Vupd ), and by s1 (s2 ) the
vectors of the quantized bits of the projections in Vorig (Vupd ).
The angle threshold s for the strong hash can be computed
in a similar fashion to that in the weak hash. Denote by
Ns = Fq2 the number of pixels in an MB tube. Given the
MSE threshold, TM , the corresponding angle threshold for
N s TM
any MB tube 1 is given by s = arcsin  1
. To reduce
the number of thresholds that need to be transmitted, we
select L + 1 representative thresholds sl , l = 0, 1, . . . , L
which can be pre-designed. We say that s is in class Cl
if sl1 < s sl , l = 1, 2, . . . , L, and the representative
threshold value for class Cl is sl . Only the class index l
is transmitted. When s1 belongs to class Cl , the cross-over
probability p between the entry bits in s1 and s2 should
l
satisfy p pls = s if the underlying MB tubes satisfy the
MSE constraint TM . A small false negative rate is guaranteed
because any 1 that gives a s in any class Cl will always be
checked against the largest value sl in that class.
However, sending out the raw bits in the strong hash as
is can be wasteful, we therefore apply a channel coding
concept to reduce the hash rate needed as elaborated below.
72 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012

In particular, we model the correlation between s1 and s2 by

a binary symmetric channel with some cross-over probability
p that is determined by the distortion between the underlying
MB tubes 1 and 2 . Instead of s1 being directly sent from
user U1 to user U2 , only the syndrome bits of s1 are sent
using a suitable binary channel code [17]. If s1 belongs to class
Cl , we choose a channel code such that it is able to correct
l
a flipping probability of pls = s and rely on the decoding
success to perform our hypothesis test.
Here, we choose to use LDPC codes as channel codes [11],
[12], and so the syndrome bits are just the parity bits. Let
P GF (2)Ks ns be the parity check matrix of the correspond-
ing LDPC code for class l with ns syndrome bits, i.e., rate Fig. 6. Bit-plane view of a block of 64 coefficients. Bit-planes are arranged
in increasing order with 0 corresponding to the least significant bit.
R(pls ) = 1 Knss , such that it is able to correct up to Ks pls
bit errors. The encoded strong hash s1e is then computed by
Combining the above equation with (5), we have
s1e = P T s1 . The receiving user U2 would then use an LDPC

belief propagation (BP) decoder to decode the syndrome bits
using the corresponding s2 as the side-information. Following
Korner and Marton [18], we let U2 first compute the encoded
bits s2e of s2 and its modulo-2 sum with s1e . Denote by
z = s1 s2 and by ze = s1e s2e , we have
ze = s1e s2e = P T s1 P T s2 = P T (s1 s2 ) = P T z.
It is easy to see that z should be Bernoulli with some
parameter p. Since P T is designed to correct up to a flipping
probability pls , user U2 should be able to decode z from ze if
p pls and fail otherwise. Therefore, the hypothesis testing
problem of whether the uncoded strong hash satisfies the
Hamming distance check is recast as a decodability problem.
It is also worth noting that the rate of the LDPC code will be
close to the theoretical lower bound H(ps ) when Ks is large,
where H(.) is the entropy function. It is also for this reason
that we group several MB tubes into categories depending
on their class Cl so that the projected bit values can be
concatenated to increase length. As a result of applying the
syndrome encoding, large rate savings compared to directly
sending the binary bits can be obtained. This is especially true
when the desired video distortion is low and the corresponding
threshold pls is small. However, LDPC BP decoding requires
more computations, so we only apply the strong hash checks
to GOF pairs that pass the weak hash check.
To verify if the content units satisfy the MSE threshold TM ,
user U2 also needs to check the MSE between 1 and 2 in
addition to the LDPC decodability check. Using (2), we can
obtain an estimate of their Euclidean distance as follows:
dE (1 , 2 ) =
 also passes the weak hash check) but fails the MSE check,
dH (s1 , s2 )
1 2 + 2 2 21 2  cos ( ) (5)
Ks
where dH (s1 , s2 ) is the Hamming distance returned by the
LDPC decoder (the l1 norm of z in this case). However, 1
is unknown at user U2 . Suppose s1 comes from an MB tube
that belongs to class Cl and thus has a threshold angle sl , we
know from Fig. 5 and the classification criteria that
Ns TM Ns TM
u1 = 1  < = u 1 . (6)
sin sl sin sl1
dE (1 , 2 ) < max (d1 , d2 ) = dEm (1 , 2 ) (7)
where

d1 = u 2 + 2 2 2u 1 |2  cos ( dH (s1 ,s2 ) );
 1 Ks
d2 = u2 + 2 2 2u |2  cos ( dH (s1 ,s2 ) ).
1 1 Ks
(4)
Therefore, dEm (1 , 2 ) Ns TM provides a sufficient condi-
tion for the MSE requirement dE (1 , 2 ) Ns TM . Since
sl , Ns , TM and Ks are given, and 2 2 and dH (s1 , s2 ) can be
computed at U2 , the MSE check can be easily performed.
In summary, the strong hash check works as follows. For
each pair of GOFs that pass the weak hash check, user U2
will classify the MB tubes for the GOF in video Vupd in
the same way as is instructed by user U1 and perform the
corresponding LDPC decoding. If the decoding fails, U2 will
mark the MB tubes and request retransmission. Otherwise, the
decoded Hamming distance is used to perform the MSE check
by verifying dEm (1 , 2 ) Ns TM .
V. Rate-Efficient Update
For GOFs that fail the weak hash check, user U2 should
inform user U1 that these GOFs in video Vorig are obsolete
and should be deleted. User U2 will also send both the new
GOFs in video Vupd that none of the GOFs in video Vorig
match and the MB tubes that fail the strong hash decoding
process. Users can choose appropriate encoding schemes,
e.g., H.264, according to the application requirements to
encode the GOFs and MBs.
If an MB tube passes the strong hash check (and hence
it is still likely that the corresponding MB tubes are highly
correlated since the decoded Hamming distance passed the
angular threshold. Therefore, the amount of rate needed to
update the MBs can be reduced if user U2 is able to exploit
this correlation. We will apply a DVC technique to do so, such
that client U2 transmits just enough information of 2 to user
U1 to perform incremental updates to 2 using 1 as side-
information. The maximum MSE dEm (1 , 2 ) described in (7)
is used to estimate the rate needed to update the corresponding
MB tube to a quality of no less than TM .
ZHANG et al.: VSYNC: BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT AND DISTORTION-TOLERANT VIDEO FILE SYNCHRONIZATION
Fig. 7. Partitioning of the quantization lattice into levels. Xi is the source,
X i is the quantized codeword, and Yi is the side-information. The number of
levels in the partition tree depends on the effective correlation between X i
and Yi .
The DVC update procedure is based on the PRISM DVC
scheme introduced by Puri et al. [19]. A 2-D DCT is applied to
the first MB in the MB tube 2 . The transformed coefficients
are zig-zag scanned into a vector, Xi , i = 1, 2, . . . , q2 . A
scalar quantizer is then applied to the coefficients to obtain
X i , with a quantization step size chosen based on the
desired quality TM (or TP ). Denote also by Yi the zig-zag
scanned DCT coefficients of the first MB in 1 . Assume
additive noise between Xi and Yi , i.e., Yi = Xi + Ni where Ni
represents the correlation noise. The correlation between Xi
and Yi can then be interpreted in terms of the number of most
significant bit-planes of the quantized version X i that can be
inferred from the side-information Yi . This is shown in Fig. 6,
where white colored bits represent the predictable bits while
the remaining least significant bit-planes shown in black and
grey color are innovations which need to be encoded and
transmitted. Starting from the least significant bit-plane of X i,
each successive bit-plane identifies a partition of codewords
containing X i . The number of least significant bits that need
to be transmitted for the update is given by the minimum tree-
depth for which the distance between successive codewords in
the partition is greater than twice the effective noise magnitude
between X i and Yi . The effective noise magnitude [19] is the
sum of the variance characteristics of Ni , which is obtained by
offline training, and the quantization step size . This would
enable correct decoding of X i at the decoder using Yi . Fig. 7
demonstrates an example where the effective noise magnitude
is 2 and the necessary tree depth is 2.
Clearly, one needs to know the correlation between each
pair of Xi and Yi to infer the number of syndrome bits that
corresponds to the tree depth mentioned above. In this paper,
we use the upper bound MSE dEm (1 , 2 ) in (7) between the
pair of MB tubes 1 and 2 to infer such correlation. In
particular, we classify the correlation into 16 classes, which
are separated by a set of 15 thresholds Tj (j = 1, 2, . . . , 15).
Class j is chosen when Tj1 dEm (1 , 2 ) < Tj . Each class
j is associated with a block correlation noise whose variance
statistics were determined based on dEm (1 , 2 ) using offline
training [19]. However, the offline training procedure does
not guarantee precise determination of the correlation noise
between the blocks. We treat this uncertainty by jointly encod-
ing the most significant bit-planes of individual coefficients
that need to be communicated to the decoder with a coset
channel code. These bit-planes correspond to the grey color
73
in Fig. 6. The remaining least significant bit-planes, shown in
black color, are encoded using a suitable entropy code. The
details of these codes can be found in [19].
It is worth noting that only the I-frame of the MB tubes are
updated using the above approach. The subsequent P-frames
are still encoded using standard video encoding schemes that
exploit temporal correlation. This is because, in most cases,
temporal correlation is stronger than spatial correlation and
rate savings are most evident for I-frames that would have to
be intra-coded otherwise.
VI. Video Assembly
User U2 will send all the necessary update information
and the assembly instructions to U1 to assemble a version of
the updated video, V upd . The assembly instructions include
which original frames and MB tubes should be kept and
deleted, what and where is the new content to be added and
which encoding and decoding scheme is to be used, and any
necessary rearrangement of the original GOFs and frames. The
instructions usually cost negligible overhead compared to the
video content itself and can be included as headers of the re-
transmitted data. Since some of the original reference frames
in Vorig may no longer exist after the synchronization process,
user U1 might need to re-encode some of the frames. To reduce
computational overhead, it is possible to design a procedure
that uses as much compressed information as possible from
the original video that U1 has, and only re-encode frames that
contain modified MBs and GOFs that have frames deleted.
VII. Experimental Results
In this section, we evaluate VSYNC and compare it with
direct transmission using H.264 and synchronization using
rsync in terms of the rate-distortion (RD) performance. The
following parameters are chosen: GOF size F = 15 frames,
MB size q q = 16 16, number of weak hash projections
per GOF Kw = 256, number of strong hash projections per MB
tube Ks = 256. For simplicity, L = 2 classes are chosen for the
quantization of the strong hash thresholds. This corresponds
to
Ns TM
L+1 = 3 thresholds 0 = s0 < s1 < s2 . Since s = arcsin  1
,
we choose the average l2 norm and the smallest l2 norm of
the MB tubes 1 in each GOF to compute the corresponding
thresholds s1 and s2 respectively. Since the quantization of
thresholds represents only a small overhead to the strong hash,
a finer quantization will reduce overall hash rate. The actual
weak (strong) thresholds and the rate of the LDPC codes are
computed directly from the desired PSNRs as discussed in the
previous sections.
For simplicity, we assume Vorig is a compressed version (to
some PSNR) of some original source video Vsrc , and Vupd is
an edited version of Vsrc and has the same quality as Vsrc .
The goal is to synchronize Vorig to Vupd to get V upd such that
the relative PSNR of V upd to Vupd is the same as that of Vorig
to Vsrc . We test several edit cases and show the performance
in terms of the transmission rate (kb/s) needed to realize the
synchronization for different relative PSNRs of Vorig to Vsrc
(or V upd to Vupd ).
74 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
Fig. 8. RD performance of synchronization using VSYNC, rsync, and H.264
for video Akiyo and News.
Fig. 9. Edit process for video Motorcycle.
A. Addition of New Frames
The test videos used are Akiyo (176 144, 25 f/s, 12 s,
300 frames) and News (176 144, 25 f/s, 12 s, 300 frames).
Video Vorig is a compressed version of Akiyo, and video Vupd
is obtained by adding the first 25 frames of video News to
the beginning of video Akiyo. It can be seen from Fig. 8 that
VSYNC is able to save a considerable amount of transmission
by only sending the newly added frames therefore utilizing
all the original overlapping content, while rsync again fails to
capture the content-level structure of the video file and thus is
as expensive as re-transmitting the entire video using H.264.
B. Re-Arrangement and Deletion
In this case, the Motorcycle (VGA) video [20] (640 480,
25 f/s, 12 s) is used. This is a 12-s clip (from the first 12 s)
extracted and cropped from YouTube. Vorig is a compressed
version of Motorcycle using H.264 with group of picture size
15. Vupd is an edited version of Motorcycle using the edit
process illustrated in Fig. 9: the original last 4 s of 100 frames
are rearranged to the beginning and the original sixth to eighth
seconds of 75 frames are deleted. The user wants to update
his video to the new version at the same resolution of their
original videos Vorig .
Fig. 10 demonstrates the performance comparisons of
VSYNC, rsync, and H.264 for each user. The y-axis represents
the desired quality of V upd in PSNR (dB) compared to Vupd ,
and the x-axis shows the rate (kb/s) needed to realize the
synchronization. In this case, the edit only involves rearranging
and deleting frames, i.e., no new content is added. A genie-
aided system should be able to inform the users to only
rearrange the content. Rsync is unable to exploit the strong
similarity between videos, and thus is as expensive as re-
transmitting the entire video using H.264. This is wasteful
Fig. 10. RD performance curves for VSYNC, rsync, and H.264 for video
Motorcycle.
Fig. 11. Tampering of video Foreman by adding a text banner to the upper-
left corner of the entire video.
Fig. 12. Detected tampered regions (black) using VSYNC.
since no new content has been added to the original video.
VSYNC automatically detects the changes and the only over-
head is the transmitted hash. All the overlapping content was
used and the deletion of frames was successfully detected,
which avoided unnecessary transmission.
It is worth noting that the hash rate can be lower for higher
PSNR requirements. This is because higher PSNR results in
a lower flipping probability which gives a smaller rate for the
LDPC code. The overall hash overhead is just a small fraction
of the actual video rate.
C. Localized Tampering Detection and Correction
We test the ability of VSYNC to capture and correct video
tampering. In this case, we let Vupd be the original Foreman
(176 144, 25 f/s, 12 s, 300 frames) video, and Vorig be the
compressed and tampered version of it. The tampering is to
add a small text banner of size 52 32 to the upper left corner
of the entire video, as shown in Fig. 11. The goal is to detect
and correct such tampering using minimal data transfer.
In this case, the weak hash was first able to align the
matching GOFs correctly, and the strong hash successfully
detected the tampering of the sub-frame regions, as shown in
Fig. 12. The video is divided into 1616 MB tubes as depicted
by the white lines in the figure, and the black regions represent
the regions that fail the strong hash check.
The RD curves that correspond to correcting the tampered
regions using VSYNC, rsync, and H.264 are demonstrated in
Fig. 13. It can be seen that rsync results in re-transmission of
the entire new video, as expected, due to the drastic change in
the underlying encoded bit-stream. On the contrary, VSYNC
ZHANG et al.: VSYNC: BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT AND DISTORTION-TOLERANT VIDEO FILE SYNCHRONIZATION
Fig. 13. RD performance of tampering detection and correction using
VSYNC, rsync, and H.264 for video Foreman.
TABLE II
Comparison of Performance in Computational Complexity and
Accuracy Among Approaches Using 1) Weak Hash Only;
2) Strong Hash Only; and 3) Weak + Strong Hash
Hash Time (ratio) Precision (%) Recall (%)
Weak 1 13.9 100
Strong 105 100 100
Weak+strong 70 100 100
transmits only the data necessary to correct the tampered
regions while utilizing relevant content from Vorg .
To see the benefit of having a layered weak/strong hash
architecture, we also compare the systems performance to
when only weak hash or strong hash is used in the Foreman
case. Table II shows the computation time, precision and
recall for the following cases: 1) only weak hash is used;
2) only strong hash is used; and 3) both weak hash and
strong hash are used. The computation time refers to the CPU
time needed to perform the entire VSYNC protocol during the
synchronization process, normalized with respect to when only
weak hash is used. Precision is the percentage of MB tubes
matches found that are correct, while recall is the percentage
of total actual MB tubes matches that are found. It can be
seen that while the weak hash has a high recall of 100%, its
precision is very low. Using only the weak hash gives many
false positives due to mis-alignment of GOFs and it is unable
to detect localized edits. The strong hash is able to both align
the GOFs correctly and detect the tampering, but it requires
much more computational time due to the LDPC decoding
complexity. The hierarchical approach however, achieves a
balanced tradeoff between accuracy and complexity.
VIII. Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper, VSYNC, a novel video file synchronization
protocol, was proposed to minimize data transfer in synchro-
nizing video files across a bidirectional communications link.
A hierarchical hashing scheme was designed to efficiently
check possible matches across videos and only transmit the
modified content. In addition to the novelty of efficient video
content synchronization, the key contribution of VSYNC with
regard to prior work was our distance preserving hash, i.e.,
we can quantify the distortion between video frames using
the Hamming distance between hashes and thus can determine
a suitable threshold given a target distortion acceptance. The
75
hash check process also aided the application of distributed
coding schemes to reduce hash rates.
The work presented can be extended in many ways. We are
currently working on including chrominance information in
the protocol, to enable VSYNC to handle color videos. The
chrominance is also helpful in the hash verification process by
utilizing color features. We are also working on generalizing
the framework into a large-scale video synchronization system
by extending the hashing structure. In application scenarios
where one wants to update a database of video files with a new
incoming video, the first job would be to find if similar video
files already exist. We can construct visual words as another
layer of hash to reduce the search space, and only perform
the VSYNC algorithm described in the paper on a much
smaller set of videos. Other possible future work includes
synchronizing videos taken by multiple cameras with different
capturing angles, and securing the synchronization process. A
fully designed system that automatically synchronizes videos
at remote ends using secured network protocols would be
highly desirable in a wide range of applications.
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1&feature=hd
Hao Zhang (S06M09) received the B.E. degree
in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in 2006, and the M.A. degree in
statistics and the M.S. degree in electrical engineer-
ing and computer sciences from the University of
California (UC) at Berkeley, Berkeley, in 2009. He
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
From 2005 to 2006, he was a Research Assistant
with the Center for Intelligent Image and Document
Processing, Tsinghua University. He was an Engi-
neering Intern with Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA, in 2007. Since 2007, he has
been a Graduate Student Researcher with the Berkeley Audio Visual Signal
Processing and Communication Systems Laboratory, UC Berkeley. His current
research interests include image and video processing and communications,
distributed source coding, computer vision, and machine learning.
Mr. Zhang was a recipient of the U.S. Vodafone Foundation Fellowship
from 2006 to 2008. He received a Best Student Paper Award at ACM MM
2008, a Best Paper Finalist in ICASSP 2009, and a Best Paper Finalist in
ICIP 2010.
Chuohao Yeo received the B.S. degree in electrical
science and engineering and the M.E. degree in
electrical engineering and computer science from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
Cambridge, in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in elec-
trical engineering from the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of
California at Berkeley, Berkeley.
From 2001 to 2002, he was a Research Assistant
with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT.
He was a Research Engineer with the Institute for
Infocomm Research, Singapore, in 2004, and was an Engineering Intern
with Omnivision Technologies, Sunnyvale, CA, in 2005. His current research
interests include image and video processing and communications, distributed
source coding, computer vision, and machine learning.
Dr. Yeo was a recipient of the Singapore Government Public Service
Commission Overseas Merit Scholarship from 1998 to 2002. Since 2004,
he has been receiving the Singapores Agency for Science, Technology, and
Research Overseas Graduate Scholarship. He received a Best Student Paper
Award at SPIE VCIP in 2007.
Kannan Ramchandran (S92M93SM98F05)
received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering
from Columbia University, New York, NY, in 1993.
Since 1999, he has been a Professor with the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, University of California (UC) at Berkeley,
Berkeley. From 1993 to 1999, he was a Faculty
Member with the Department of Electrical and Com-
puter Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC), Urbana. Prior to that, he was
with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ,
from 1984 to 1990. His current research interests include distributed signal
processing and coding for networks, robust and scalable video delivery over
wireless and peer-to-peer networks, robust distributed storage, multi-user
information theory, media and information-theoretic security, and multiscale
statistical image processing and modeling.
Dr. Ramchandran received the Eli Jury Award in 1993 from Columbia
University for his doctoral thesis, the National Science Foundation CAREER
Award in 1997, the Office of Naval Research and Army Research Office
Young Investigator Awards in 1996 and 1997, respectively, the Henry Mag-
nusky Scholar Award at UIUC, and the Okawa Foundation Prize from the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley
in 2001. He was the co-recipient of the two Senior Best Paper Awards from the
IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1993 and 1997. He has been a co-author on
several Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards in leading conferences in
his field including the IEEE Packet Video Workshop in 2000, the IEEE/ACM
Information Processing in Sensor Networks in 2005, the IEEE MMSP in 2007
(finalist), the ACM Multimedia in 2008, the IEEE International Conference on
Image Processing in 2008, and the IEEE ICASSP in 2009 (finalist). He was
also the recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Department
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley in 2009. He
serves on numerous technical program committees for premier conferences
in image, video, and signal processing, communications, and information
theory.