Wireless multimedia utilizing MPEG-4 error resilient tools

Standardized video compression has grown significantly in use for a number of different applications over the last 8 years. Perhaps the best known uses of video compression standards are for videoconferencing and for digital storage media and broadcast. In the case of videoconferencing, the field has been dominated by standards issued by the ITU-T, including H.261 and H.263. In the case of compressed video for storage, playback and broadcast, the ISO standards MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 have dominated. Spurred on by third generation cellular and the promise of wideband wireless connectivity, activity in the area mobile multimedia applications has increased dramatically. Wireless networks present a new challenge for multimedia system designers. This is mainly due to the high sensitivity of these bitstreams to channel errors. Many new video compression tools that address error resilience have been included in the latest voluntary international multimedia standard, MPEG-4. This standard combines both the properties of real-time communications and one-way entertainment applications. Furthermore, MPEG4 includes a number of new tools in the realm of video coding which provide error resilient coding for transmission of video over error prone channels. This paper provides an overview of the video error resilience tools of MPEG-4. Results are provided which demonstrate the performance of these tools when operating in a typical wireless environment.