Priority-based selective H.264 SVC streaming over erroneous converged networks

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed description and discussion of new optimal H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) transmission method over multi-path networks that have variable packet loss rates (PLR). The proposed method has three steps: (1) using flexible macroblock ordering (FMO), it prioritizes SVC layers and slice groups (SG) according to their affect on video quality; (2) it measures current channel status and predicts future bandwidths (BW); and (3) it allocates SVC layers and SGs to the prioritized channels by PLR. Experiments show that the proposed selective streaming method can improve video quality as much as 3.4 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and has better error resilience than traditional streaming methods.