Distortion-Minimized Video Slicing for Unequal Loss Protection

Abstract

This letter proposes a distortion-minimized slicing scheme for the unequal loss protection of compressed video bitstreams transported over packet networks. Unlike most existing slicing methods where each slice includes nearly equal number of video macroblocks, the proposed scheme reorders the macroblocks in one video frame according to their importance, and then divides them into two slices with an unequal proportion. According to given channel conditions and a novel unequal loss protection scheme, the more appropriate macroblock division ratio can be found out to achieve minimized end-to-end distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed slicing scheme outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with fixed macroblock division ratio.