A H.264 Based Joint Source Channel Coding Scheme over Wireless Channels

Joint source channel coding (JSCC) is an effective method which trade off the efficiency and the quality of the video transmission. In this paper, a new rate-quality (R-Q) model is first proposed to represent the coding characteristics of H.264 instead of rate-distortion (R-D) model. Then, the end-to-end video transmission distortion is analyzed and an adaptive JSCC over wireless channel based on the R-Q model of the H.264 and the error protection characteristics of the Turbo code is proposed, which can optimize the rate allocation of the available network bandwidth between source coding and channel coding according to the current status of the wireless channels, so as to improve the robustness. The experiment results indicate that, compared with the scheme using the fixed channel coding rate, under the same channel conditions, our proposed JSCC scheme can greatly improve the transmission robustness and achieve better reconstructed video quality at the receiver.