An unequal packet loss protection scheme for H.264/AVC video transmission

In this work, we present an unequal packet loss protection scheme for robust H.264/AVC video transmission over lossy networks. This scheme combines erasure coding, H.264/AVC error resilience techniques and importance measures in video coding. The unequal importance of the video packets is identified in the group of pictures (GOP) and the H.264/AVC data partitioning levels. Using a fixed amount of redundancy, more important packets of a video stream are protected with a more powerful erasure code than the less important packets. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by system implementation and performance evaluation. We show that the received video quality, as measured by PSNR, is significantly improved with the packet loss rate increasing when the unequal loss protection (ULP) scheme is used. More importantly, we have observed that ULP can achieve higher PSNR values and better user perceived quality, even though using less redundancy than the equal loss protection (ELP) scheme.