Joint source-channel error detection with standard compatibility for wireless video transmission

Robust video transmission over wireless channels is very critical due to channel impairments and to their effect on the compressed bitstream. Error detection is a clue point as, if errors are detected, their concealment may be performed. In spite of that, data assisted error detection is often not sufficient to guarantee error detection is correctly performed in any case. A joint source-channel error detection approach is thus proposed in the paper, where standard compatibility is kept, as the source decoder needs not to be modified in order to exploit the proposed technique. This technique may be useful in any case of packet transmission where data assisted error detection is particularly difficult to be performed for some packet partition and compatibility to a standard is required. With the proposed technique, information about the source coded bitstream may be exploited in order to reduce the redundancy added and the amount of data to be discarded. In particular, the case of MPEG-4 video transmission is analyzed in the paper.