An Aggressive Channel Rate Allocation for Unequal Error Protection of Scalable Video

With the rapid development of multimedia technology, video transmission over error prone channels is becoming a reality, if not a necessity. Lossy video coding together with channel errors results in more degradation in quality of the video. Unequal Error Protection (UEP) is a suitable solution for this concern. Using UEP with scalable video coding (SVC) improves the quality of the transmitted video. The efficiency of this combination can be further enhanced by carefully considering the importance of each protected element. In this paper, we propose an efficient UEP scheme to protect scalable video, coded with the scalable extension of H.264/AVC, over networks with packet loss. Genetic algorithm (GA) is exploited to achieve the optimal rate allocation for each layer. Experimental results show a significant improvement of 1.2dB in average, in comparison with conventional unequal error protection methods for H.264/AVC.

Keywords:

Unequal error protection (UEP) , scalable video coding (SVC) , H.264/AVC , Genetic Algorithm (GA) , Reed Solomon coding