Error-resilient spectral fine granular scalable (SFGS) video coding for network streaming applications

As networking grows, video transmission becomes more popular. MPEG4 FGS is a video coding technique designed to cope with variability of bandwidth gracefully. Our previously proposed spectral FGS (SFGS) coding technique, a variation of traditional FGS, when in combination with a rate-distortion-based rate allocation scheme, was capable of making video quality smoother between pictures in a sequence. However, both FGS and SFGS-coded video streams, when transmitted through networks, may be partially corrupted by channel errors or packet loss. To resist errors, we add sync codes according to the spectrum-grouping property of SFGS to enhance error resilience capability. This scheme of adding sync codes is simple, does not cause heavy loads of the system, and can on average improve video quality by 1/spl sim/3 dB when errors are present.