Reliable Video Transmission Using Codes Close to the Channel Capacity

Abstract

Long Reed-Solomon codes over the prime field GF(216+1) are proposed as a low overhead channel code for reliable transmission of video over noisy and lossy channels. The added redundancy is near optimal from the information theoretic point of view contrary to the conventionally used intra-coding and sync (marker) insertion in video transmission that are not justified theoretically. Compared to known source-channel coding methods, we have achieved the quality of the output of source coder by providing nearly error free transmission. (By nearly error free we mean an arbitrarily small error probability.) The price paid for such remarkable video quality improvement and relatively low complexity is long delay due to long codes. However, the incurred delay is justifiable for Internet low bit video transmission and in high quality video broadcasting systems like streaming MPEG2 video where each encoder and decoder may have three frames delay. The proposed method surpasses the previous works for video transmission over binary symmetric channels, bursty channels, and packet loss channels. Also we propose a nearly error free transmission system for Gaussian channels for completeness of the work. We have also proposed short codes, which with larger overhead provide nearly error free transmission, and still outperform the previous works