On a region-of-interest based approach to robust wireless video transmission

Abstract

This paper presents a scheme aiming at transmitting real-time video to wireless channel with vigorously varying quality, which is in practice the norm rather than the exception. Region of interest (ROI) is an efficient approach to making the video more adaptive to the wireless channel because ROI is the region that human eyes tend to put more attention to than the remainder region (RM). In our proposed scheme, we adopted this feature. The real-time source video stream is divided into two regions, the ROI and the RM regions. The two regions were encoded using H.263 standard codec such that the video transmission is adaptive to the current channel state, which is characterized by the effective data rate that varies from tens of kilobits per second to hundreds of kilobits per second. Channel state parameters are fed back to the source coder to adjust the compression ratio as well as the intra/inter options of the encoders. Results including frame loss probability, compression characteristics, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) against channel states are given, indicating that the resulting adaptive video codec can respond judiciously to time-varying channel quality. Our scheme is evaluated together with a ROI-enabled moving picture coding standard JPEG2000. Using the features provided in JPEG2000, we have made the JPEG2000 codec adaptive to the vigorously varying wireless channel and then compared it with the H.263 scheme. Our technique is suitable for a broad area of applications including real-time news reporting and video conferencing.