An FEC-based error control scheme for wireless MPEG-4 video transmission

In this paper, we propose an FEC-based error control scheme for the transmission of low bit rate MPEG-4 video over wireless channels. The proposed error control scheme, through integrating with MPEG-4 inherent error resilient techniques, divides the MPEG-4 bitstream into several classes. Such division of the bitstream not only facilitates unequal error protection for different classes of data but also allows local reorganization of the bitstream into a fixed-length structure. This reorganization enables robust decoding at the receiving end, however, results in little side information and causes negligible delay. The proposed scheme can also be combined with motion-compensation based error concealment for effective post processing. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is much better than that of the simple equal error protection scheme, not only in PSNR but also in visual quality, in terms of the reconstructed video frames at the receiver.