Distributed Wireless Visual Communication With Power Distortion Optimization

This paper proposes a novel framework called DCast for distributed video coding and transmission over wireless networks, which is different from existing distributed schemes in three aspects. First, coset quantized DCT coefficients and motion data are directly delivered to the channel coding layer without syndrome or entropy coding. Second, transmission power is directly allocated to coset data and motion data according to their distributions and magnitudes without forward error correction. Third, these data are transformed by Hadamard and then directly mapped using a dense constellation (64K-QAM) for transmission without Gray coding. One of the most important properties in this framework is that the coding and transmission rate is fixed and distortion is minimized by allocating the transmission power. Thus, we further propose a power distortion optimization algorithm to replace the traditional rate distortion optimization. This framework avoids the annoying cliff effect caused by the mismatch between transmission rate and channel condition. In multicast, each user can get approximately the best quality matching its channel condition. Our experiment results show that the proposed DCast outperforms the typical solution using H.264 over 802.11 up to 8 dB in video PSNR in video broadcast. Even in video unicast, the proposed DCast is still comparable to the typical solution.