A new error resilience method for FGS video enhancement bit-stream

Abstract

Video streaming over the Internet usually encounters with bandwidth variations and packet losses, which impacted badly on the reconstructed video quality. Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) can well provide bit-rate adaptability to different bandwidth conditions over the Internet, due to its fine granular and error resilience. However, the effective solution of packet losses is Multiple Description Coding (MDC), but a great deal of redundancy information is brought up. For an FGS video bit-stream, the base layer is usually very small and of high importance, error-free transmission could be achieved through classical error resilience technique. As a result, the overall streaming quality is mostly dependent on the enhancement layer. Moreover, it is worthy of note that the different bit-planes are of different importance, which are suitable to unequal protection (UEP) strategy. So, a new joint MDC and UEP method is proposed to protect the enhancement layer in this paper. In the proposed method, the MDC encoder/decoder is embedded into the normal enhancement layer encoder/decoder. By considering of the unequal protection of bit-plane and the redundancy of MDC, the two most significant bit-planes adopt the MDC-based strategy. While, the remaining bit-planes only encoded by normal enhancement layer coding system. Experimental results are demonstrated to testify the efficiency of our proposed method.