Wireless MPEG-4 video communication on DSP chips

Abstract

We discuss the design and implementation of wireless video communication systems on DSPs. We cover both video coding and the channel coding aspects of the problem. The emphasis of the article is on highlighting the issues involved both from an algorithmic standpoint as well as from a DSP standpoint. We discuss the first DSP implementation, to the authors' knowledge, of the MPEG-4 simple profile video standard. We give an overview of DSPs and highlight the salient features that make them especially well-suited for wireless applications. We describe MPEG-4 simple profile video coding noting that in order to facilitate interoperability, it is important that wireless devices use standardized compression algorithms. We discuss our implementation of the MPEG-4 simple profile video codec on Texas Instruments' TMS320C54x DSP and discuss the issues involved. We highlight some general and application-specific DSP instructions on the TMS320C54x DSP that enable us to implement the core operations in the video coder efficiently, often in a single cycle, with minimal control overhead. We describe the performance of MPEG-4 video compression for a variety of content and formats. We give a description of channel coding with the H.223 standard. Then, we describe several channel coding experiments using both unequal and equal protection on MPEG-4 video sent through a simulated GSM channel. Unequal error protection, which ensures fewer errors in the important portions of the MPEG-4 video bitstream, provides improved quality when compared to equal error protection under harsh error conditions.