Layer-Aware Unequal Error Protection for Scalable H.264 Video Robust Transmission over Packet Lossy Networks

The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) amendment of the H.264/AVC standard is an up-to-date video compression standard. The various scalable layers have different contribution to the quality of the reconstructed video sequence due to the use of hierarchical prediction and the drift propagation. This paper proposes a novel trapezoidal-unequal error protection (UEP) scheme which significantly reduces the redundancy but rarely decreases the performance by taking into account the characteristics of the video coding and the adoptive forward error correction (FEC) sufficiently. In order to optimally distribute FEC codes, the paper then proposes a layer-aware distortion model to accurately estimate the decrement of video quality caused by the loss of quality enhancement layers, drift propagation and error concealment in the scalable H.264/AVC video. Experimental results show that the proposed trapezoidal UEP scheme has better robustness and in the meanwhile reduces the coding redundancy greatly in different channel circumstance compared with the traditional UEP scheme.