Perceptual quality optimized FEC for video streaming

Video transmission over Internet is often afflicted by various packet losses. The packet-lever forward error correction (FEC) is often used for error recovery in order to enhance the end-to-end video quality. However, the quality metrics used in traditional FEC scheme designing such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) have been founded not correlate well with human perceptual quality and usually leads to a suboptimal choice of FEC coding parameters. This paper proposes a perceptual quality optimized FEC scheme for video streaming over lossy channels, where a perceptual quality metric is developed to optimize the FEC coding at limited bandwidth. Both analytical and experimental approaches are used to build the perceptual video quality metric. Based on the proposed metric, the perceptual quality optimized FEC parameters are selected in a rate-quality optimization way. Experimental results show the optimized FEC performs better than traditional algorithm in the sense of improving the end-user perceptual quality.