Fine Grained Loss Protection for Robust Internet Video Streaming

摘要

Several embedded video coding schemes have been recently developed for multimedia streaming over IP. In particular, Fine-Granular-Scalability (FGS) video coding has been recently adopted by the MPEG-4 standard as the core video-compression method for streaming applications. From its inception, the FGS scalability structure was designed to be packet-loss resilient especially under Unequal Packet-loss Protection (UPP). In this paper, we introduce the notion of Fine Grained Loss Protection (FGLP), which provides UPP within the FGS enhancement-layer, and we develop an analytical framework for evaluating FGLP bounds. Based on these bounds, we show the impact of applying fine-grained protection to the FGS enhancement-layer for different types of video sequences and over a wide range of bit-rates and packet-loss ratios. Subsequently, the FGLP framework has been implemented using forward error correction codes and its performance for Internet video streaming has been evaluated. As illustrated by our extensive simulation results, fine-grained loss protection for the FGS enhancement-layer can provide significant resilience under moderate-to-high packet-loss ratios (e.g. 5-10%).