Scalable Joint Source-Channel Coding for the Scalable Extension of H.264/AVC

This paper proposes a novel joint source-channel coding (JSCC) methodology which minimizes the end-to-end distortion for the transmission over packet loss channels of scalable video encoded using SVC, the scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The proposed JSCC approach performs channel protection using low-density parity-check codes and relies on Lagrangian-based optimization techniques to derive the appropriate protection levels for each layer produced by the scalable source codec. Our JSCC approach for SVC can support spatial, temporal and quality scalability and can provide an optimized channel protection in any scalable setting. Experiments show that our JSCC methodology yields competitive results against state-of-the-art Lagrangian-based JSCC algorithms. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our approach significantly reduces the number of computations needed to derive the rate-distortion hulls. Moreover, the proposed approach constructs convex rate-distortion hulls for each frame, irrespective of the target rate. This allows the pre-computation of the convex rate-distortion hulls for typical packet loss channels, such that the extraction of a near-optimal JSCC allocation can be achieved on-the-fly for any target rate or packet-loss rate. We conclude that the proposed JSCC methodology provides optimized resilience against transmission errors in scalable video streaming over variable-bandwidth error-prone channels.