Video streaming over the Internet usually encounters with bandwidth variations and packet losses, which impacted badly on the reconstructed video quality. Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) can well provide bit-rate adaptability to different bandwidth conditions over the Internet, due to its fine granular and error resilience. However, the effective solution of packet losses is Multiple Description Coding (MDC), but a great deal of redundancy information is brought up. For an FGS video bit-stream, the base layer is usually very small and of high importance, error-free transmission could be achieved through classical error resilience technique. As a result, the overall streaming quality is mostly dependent on the enhancement layer. Moreover, it is worthy of note that the different bit-planes are of different importance, which are suitable to unequal protection (UEP) strategy. So, a new joint MDC and UEP method is proposed to protect the enhancement layer in this paper. In the proposed method, the MDC encoder/decoder is embedded into the normal enhancement layer encoder/decoder. By considering of the unequal protection of bit-plane and the redundancy of MDC, the two most significant bit-planes adopt the MDC-based strategy. While, the remaining bit-planes only encoded by normal enhancement layer coding system. Experimental results are demonstrated to testify the efficiency of our proposed method.

Date Published: 12 May 2006
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6246, Visual Information Processing XV, 62460R (12 May 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.665406

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6246:
Visual Information Processing XV
Zia-ur Rahman; Stephen E. Reichenbach; Mark A. Neifeld, Editor(s)