Rate-distortion optimized unequal loss protection for FGS compressed video

Video communication with quality of service (QoS) is an important and challenging task. The transmitted video stream must be able to afford the bandwidth variance and unavoidable packet loss in the Internet. In particular, fine-granular-scalability (FGS) video coding has been adopted by the MPEG-4 standard as the core video-compression method for streaming applications. From this inception, the FGS scalability structure was designed to be packet resilient especially under unequal loss protection (ULP). In this paper, we use ULP to protect FGS compressed video, and under the restriction of the network bandwidth, joint source-channel rate-distortion based optimization is performed in bit allocation to minimize the end-to-end distortion. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of our approach.