Towards the enhancement of UAV video transmission with motion intensity awareness

The use of video-equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has been increasing recently, along with the number of available applications for military and civilian employment. This unveils the need for an adaptive video-aware mechanism capable of overcoming a number of challenges related to the scarce network resources, device movement, as well as high error rates, to ensure a good video quality delivery. Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques can be tailored to provide adaptive protection with Quality of Experience (QoE) assurance over error-prone and high-mobility networks. Besides that, unique characteristics of each video sequence, such as the spatial complexity and the temporal intensity, strongly affect how the QoE will be impacted by the packet loss. This paper proposes an adaptive motion intensity and video-aware FEC mechanism with the aid of Fuzzy logic to safeguard UAV real-time video transmissions against packet loss, providing a better user experience, while saving resources. The advantages and drawbacks of the proposed mechanism in comparison to the related work are evidenced through experiments and assessed by using QoE metrics.