Skip to main content
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

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

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).

References

  1. ISO/IEC 13818-2 : Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio, part-2 video. November 1994

  2. ISO/IEC 14496-2 : Coding of audio-visual objects, part-2 visual. December 1998

  3. ITU-T Recommendation H263 : Video coding for low bit-rate communication. 1998

  4. Li W: Overview of fine granularity scalability in MPEG-4 video standard. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2001, 11(3):301–317. 10.1109/76.911157

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Wu F, Li S, Zhang Y-Q: A framework for efficient progressive fine granularity scalable video coding. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2001, 11(3):332–344. 10.1109/76.911159

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Blahut R: Theory and Practice of Error Control Codes. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass, USA; 1993.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Albanese A, Blomer J, Edmonds J, Luby M, Sudan M: Priority encoding transmission. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 1996, 42(6 pt 1):1737–1744.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Puri R, Lee K-W, Ramchandran K, Bharghavan V: An integrated source transcoding and congestion control paradigm for video streaming in the internet. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2001, 3(1):18–32. 10.1109/6046.909591

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Mohr AE, Riskin EA, Ladner RE: Unequal loss protection: graceful degradation of image quality over packet erasure channels through forward error correction. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 2000, 18(6):819–828. 10.1109/49.848236

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Cai H, Shen G, Xiong Z, Li S, Zeng B: An optimal packetization scheme for fine granularity scalable bitstream. Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS '02), May 2002, Scottsdale, Ariz, USA 5: 641–644.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Cai H, Shen G, Li S, Zeng B: Optimal rate allocation for macroblock-based progressive fine granularity scalable video coding. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, September 2002, Rochester, NY, USA 3: 745–748.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Lin S, Costello DJ: Error Control Coding: Fundamentals and Applications. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA; 1983.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Frossard P: FEC performance in multimedia streaming. IEEE Communications Letters 2001, 5(3):122–124. 10.1109/4234.913160

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Ortega A, Ramchandran K: Rate-distortion methods for image and video compression. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 1998, 15(6):23–50. 10.1109/79.733495

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Said A, Pearlman WA: A new, fast, and efficient image codec based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 1996, 6(3):243–250. 10.1109/76.499834

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Ohm J-R: Advances in scalable video coding. Proceedings of the IEEE 2005, 93(1):42–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hua Cai.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cai, H., Zeng, B., Shen, G. et al. Error-Resilient Unequal Error Protection of Fine Granularity Scalable Video Bitstreams. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2006, 045412 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/45412

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/45412

Keywords