Bit-plane-wise unequal error protection for Internet video applications

This paper presents a new bit-plane-wise unequal error protection algorithm for Internet video applications. The proposed algorithm protects a compressed embedded bitstream generated by a 3-D SPIHT algorithm by assigning unequal forward error correction (FEC) codes to each bit-plane. The proposed algorithm reduces the amount of side information needed to send the size of each code to the decoder by limiting the number of quality levels to the number of bit-planes to be sent while providing a graceful degradation of picture quality as packet losses increase. To get additional error-resilience at high packet loss rates, we extend our algorithm to multiple-substream unequal error protection. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is simple, fast and robust in hostile network conditions and therefore can provide reasonable picture quality for Internet video applications under varying network conditions.