Dynamic FEC-Distortion Optimization for H.264 Scalable Video Streaming

Forward error correction codes have been shown to be a feasible solution either in application layer or in link layer to fulfill the need of quality of service for multimedia streaming over the fluctuant channels. In this paper, we propose FEC-distortion optimization algorithms to efficiently utilize the bandwidth for better video quality. The optimization criterions are based on the unequal error protection by taking account of the error drifting problems from both temporal motion compensation and inter-layer prediction of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC scalable video coding. Also, it can adapt to the content-dependent quality contribution of each video frame in a video layer. Lightweight error-concealment is also incorporated with the proposed algorithms for better H.264 SVC streaming. For some applications where either computation might be the bottleneck or the upper bound of non-decodable probability of each video layer is specified, alternative bandwidth allocation algorithm is provided with the trade-off of slight quality degradation.