Channel coding for H.264 video in constant bit rate transmission context over 3G mobile systems

Network adaptation feature is left open in the previous video coding standards. Thus the quality of video sequences compressed by video codec like H.263 and MPEG family may fall dramatically when they are carried over error prone environments. This situation was well recognized and motivated the target to include the network friendliness into the H.264 on-going ITU-T video coding project. During the standard development process, new Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) concept has been defined to deal with special properties of transmission environments. In this paper, we will introduce H.264 NAL concept and propose, analyze performance of joint source channel coding schemes using H.264 NAL concept for third generation (3G) mobile systems. Furthermore, we studied another approach to protect the H.264 video called channel-adaptive coding. By comparing the performance of the two proposed approaches, we found that the second method had more advantages than the first one in the context of constant bit rate video transmission.