Robust Transmission of Scalable Video Coding Bitstream Over Heterogeneous Networks

Video transmission using Scalable Video Coding (SVC) enables the functionalities of adaptation for both channel bandwidth and terminal device. However, link adaptation, which requires the video bitstream to provide error resilient scalability (ERS), is currently not supported in SVC. In this paper, we propose a robust SVC bitstream transmission framework, which integrates both error resilient (ER) coding and error concealment (EC) to enable the desired link adaptability. First, at the encoder, we design an ER coding scheme for SVC using redundant pictures, in which redundant picture information (RPI) is generated under rate-distortion criteria and transmitted to the media gateway together with the SVC bitstream. Then, ERS can be effectively achieved at the media gateway by selectively adding or removing coded pictures of different video coding layers according to the RPI and current network link status. Finally, at the decoder, we take advantage of the unique characteristics of SVC to develop an EC scheme based on both the proposed Virtual-BLSkip method and Wiener filtering to recover the lost or removed enhancement layer pictures. The proposed framework has negligible impact on the coding efficiency because it transmits RPIs rather than directly adding redundancy into the original bitstream. More importantly, it successfully strikes a balance between coding efficiency, error resiliency, and operation complexity. It is capable of providing the desired ERS with extremely low complexity, and maintaining virtually the same bit rate as input video bitstream. The experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves significant performance gains over existing ER transmission schemes.