Robust Transmission of H.264/AVC Streams Using Adaptive Group Slicing and Unequal Error Protection
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Robust Transmission of H.264/AVC Streams Using Adaptive Group Slicing and Unequal Error Protection Nikolaos Thomos,1, 2 Savvas Argyropoulos,1, 2 Nikolaos V. Boulgouris,3 and Michael G. Strintzis1, 2 1 Information
Processing Laboratory, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki 54124, Greece 2 Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Informatics and Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki 57001, Greece 3 Department of Electronic Engineering, Division of Engineering, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK Received 29 July 2005; Revised 12 December 2005; Accepted 18 February 2006 We present a novel scheme for the transmission of H.264/AVC video streams over lossy packet networks. The proposed scheme exploits the error-resilient features of H.264/AVC codec and employs Reed-Solomon codes to protect effectively the streams. A novel technique for adaptive classification of macroblocks into three slice groups is also proposed. The optimal classification of macroblocks and the optimal channel rate allocation are achieved by iterating two interdependent steps. Dynamic programming techniques are used for the channel rate allocation process in order to reduce complexity. Simulations clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other recent algorithms for transmission of H.264/AVC streams. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
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INTRODUCTION
The demand for multimedia transmission over best effort networks, like the Internet, motivated most recent research on real-time streaming applications. However, due to the explosive growth of the volume of transmitted data and bandwidth variations, networks employing the Internet protocol (IP) exhibit packet erasures. Considering that the network is unaware of the transmitted content, we realize that packet erasures during transmission can cause significant problems in demanding applications such as video streaming. Error-resilient coding schemes like the H.264/AVC standard [1, 2] have been proposed to overcome these problems. The H.264/AVC standard supports valuable error-resilient tools to cope with erased packets, while it outperforms previous coding standards (H.263, MPEG-4). Unfortunately, these tools increase the computational complexity, which is undesirable for real-time video applications, and have a negative impact on compression efficiency. Therefore, schemes combining unequal error protection (UEP) algorithms with appropriate selection of error-resilient tools are often shown to be advantageous for transmission of H.264/AVC-coded streams, while maintaining the computational cost at reasonable level. In a recent work [3], data partitioning of H.264/AVC and high-memory rate compatible punctured convolutional codes (RCPC) [4] were proposed for video transmission over
wireless channels. RCPC codes were applied to the network adaptation layer (NAL). Data partitions were unequally protected according to their significance. A similar approach was presented in [5], which
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