HEVC compatible perceptual multiple description video coding for reliable video transmission over packet networks

Abstract

Multiple description coding (MDC) has been an effective scheme for reliable transmission of videos over error prone networks but requires higher data rates. Recently, perceptual video coding schemes are able to encode videos at a lower data rate, but with the same perceived decoding quality. Such schemes exploit human visual system (HVS) properties to encode videos. Although HVS characteristics have been used in MDC, but only for residual information and are not fully standard compatible. To this end, we propose a high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard compatible perceptual multiple description video coding (PMDVC) framework. Our proposed framework temporally sub-samples the input video into even and odd frame sub-sequences, which are individually encoded (using HEVC) in a perceptual manner. We encode each description using a context based visual saliency model to obtain visual saliency mask, which is optimally thresholded into salient and non-salient regions. Coding tree unit (CTU) level perceptual relevance mask of each frame is generated by dividing binary saliency mask into five different groups. The quantization parameter at CTU level of each perceptual relevant group is adjusted in such a manner that data rate is minimized while maintaining the perceived quality. Our proposed HEVC based PMDVC scheme is evaluated under lossless and lossy channel conditions. Our results show better performance in data rate reduction, perceptual peak signal-to-noise-ratio, multi- scale structural similarity index, and difference mean opinion score, when compared with HEVC based temporally sub-sampled multiple description video coding scheme.