Channel rate allocation for error-robust packet transmission of SNR-scalable DPCM-coded video

An SNR-scalable hybrid video coding scheme with a quality constraint is considered. The encoded digital data are conveyed as packets over an error-prone channel. We derive a low-complexity algorithm which assigns the best code to each packet, based on a limited set of codes, and accounting for channel conditions, code properties, the data's importance, and inter-packet dependencies. A highly error-resilient transmission is hereby achieved, the image quality being equal to approximately high-quality layer SNR for a low error probability (0.002). The quality decrease with degrading channel conditions is only moderate.