A Novel UEP Fountain Coding Scheme for Scalable Multimedia Transmission

In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to construct fountain codes that can provide unequal error protection (UEP) property. To reduce the coding complexity and improve the performance of previous duplicate UEP schemes in the literature, we implement different rate low-density parity-check codes instead of the duplication process and replace the high-complexity classical robust soliton distribution by low constant average degree distributions with high intermediate symbol recovery rates. Asymptotic analysis of both the duplicate scheme and our scheme is obtained by deriving unequal density evolution formulas over the binary erasure channel. Compared to previous UEP schemes, our scheme has lower complexity. Experimental results show that our scheme can obtain better decoding performance, especially for smaller input information length. Comparison of peak signal-noise ratio performance for the scalable video coding shows that, for moderate input information length, our scheme can provide a better basic video quality at lower overhead, but needs larger overhead to achieve a high video quality.