RD optimized, adaptive, error-resilient transmission of MPEG-4 coded video

For transmission of video data, source encoding is required to maintain bandwidth constraints and channel coding is useful in suppressing errors introduced through transmission. Furthermore, characteristics of practical channels are time-varying. In this paper, an MPEG-4 coded bitstream is channel coded using rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes. The flexibility of the RCPC codes allows the error protection to be optimally adapted to the condition of the time-varying channel using a Lagrangian optimization technique. The scheme of adaptive error control coding (ECC) to the source coded data is compared with a scheme that optimizes the amount of channel coding data to be added at the outset of transmission of the bitstream.