Selective Packet Discard in Mobile Video Delivery Based on Macroblock-Based Distortion Estimation

Mobile devices are often characterized by their relatively low processing power. Applications running on these devices should therefore avoid heavy computations in order to save valuable battery lifetime. We present a selective packet discard scheme for streaming video which does not need receiver-side calculations, therefore perfectly satisfying this constraint in many common scenarios (e.g. mobile IPTV). Decisions are made by the sender, based on a distortion estimation performed at the macroblock level. Our estimation procedure only requires superficial decoding of the video bitstream and takes important indicators like macroblock composition of frames, temporal dependencies and potential scene cuts into account. Experiments show that a considerable increase of perceived video quality by an average of 3 to 4 dB in terms of PSNR compared to frame-level estimation methods can be achieved.