The transmission of audio-visual services on low-bit-rate, wireless telecommunications systems requires the use of coding techniques that are both efficient in their use of bits and robust against errors introduced in transmission. In this paper, we present efficient techniques for improving the error resilience of audio-visual services. These techniques are based on coding simultaneously for synchronization and error protection or detection. We apply the techniques to improve the performance of the multiplexing protocol (which combines the video and audio streams so that they can be transmitted on a single circuit), and also to improve the robustness of the coded video. We show through simulations that the techniques are efficient in their use of bits and effective against bursty errors common in wireless channels. For a simulation of the DECT channel at a bit-error rate of 10/sup -3/, the techniques give an order of magnitude improvement in the probability of lost packets in the multiplexer layer over more conventional techniques. In the video layer, the techniques give an improvement of between 1-2 dB over ITU-T Recommendation H.263. The techniques proposed for the video layer also have the advantage of permitting simple transcoding with bit streams complying with H.263.
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