Systematic lossy forward error protection for error-resilient digital video broadcasting - a Wyner-Ziv coding approach

We present a practical scheme for error-resilient digital video broadcasting, using the Wyner-Ziv coding paradigm. We apply the general framework of systematic lossy source-channel coding to generate a supplementary bitstream that can correct transmission errors in the decoded video waveform up to a certain residual distortion. The systematic portion consists of a conventional MPEG-2 bitstream, which is transmitted over the error-prone channel without forward error correction. The supplementary bitstream is a low rate representation of the transmitted video sequence generated using Wyner-Ziv encoding. We use the received error-prone MPEG-2 prediction error signal as side information to decode the Wyner-Ziv bits. The decoder combines the error-prone side information and the Wyner-Ziv description to yield an improved decoded video signal. Wc describe a system that uses an embedded Wyner-Ziv codec to achieve graceful quality degradation without the need for a layered representation of the video waveform.