Iterative joint source–channel decoding of H.264 compressed video

Abstract

This paper proposes an Iterative Joint Source–Channel Decoding (IJSCD) scheme for error resilient transmission of H.264 compressed video over noisy channels by using the available H.264 compression, e.g., Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC), and channel coding, i.e., rate-1/2 Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) code, in transmission. At the receiver, the turbo decoding concept is explored to develop a joint source–channel decoding structure using a soft-in soft-out channel decoder in conjunction with the source decoding functions, e.g., CABAC-based H.264 semantic verification, in an iterative manner. Illustrative designs of the proposed IJSCD scheme for an Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, including the derivations of key parameters for soft information are discussed. The performance of the proposed IJSCD scheme is shown for several video sequences. In the examples, for the same desired Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), the proposed IJSCD scheme offers a savings of up to 2.1 dB in required channel Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) as compared to a system using the same RSC code alone. The complexity of the proposed scheme is also evaluated. As the number of iterations is controllable, a tradeoff can be made between performance improvement and the overall complexity.