EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 45412, 11 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/45412

Error-Resilient Unequal Error Protection of Fine Granularity Scalable Video Bitstreams

Hua Cai,1 Bing Zeng,2 Guobin Shen,1 Zixiang Xiong,3 and Shipeng Li1

 1Microsoft Research Asia, Haidian District, Beijing 100080, China
2Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, HKSAR, China
3Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, 77843, TX, USA
Received 12 August 2005; Revised 9 March 2006; Accepted 30 April 2006

Abstract

This paper deals with the optimal packet loss protection issue for streaming the fine granularity scalable (FGS) video bitstreams over IP networks. Unlike many other existing protection schemes, we develop an error-resilient unequal error protection (ER-UEP) method that adds redundant information optimally for loss protection and, at the same time, cancels completely the dependency among bitstream after loss recovery. In our ER-UEP method, the FGS enhancement-layer bitstream is first packetized into a group of independent and scalable data packets. Parity packets, which are also scalable, are then generated. Unequal protection is finally achieved by properly shaping the data packets and the parity packets. We present an algorithm that can optimally allocate the rate budget between data packets and parity packets, together with several simplified versions that have lower complexity. Compared with conventional UEP schemes that suffer from bit contamination (caused by the bit dependency within a bitstream), our method guarantees successful decoding of all received bits, thus leading to strong error-resilience (at any fixed channel bandwidth) and high robustness (under varying and/or unclean channel conditions).