An integrated multiple-substream unequal error protection and error concealment algorithm for Internet video applications

This paper presents a coordinated multiple-substream unequal error protection and error concealment algorithm for SPIHT-coded bitstreams transmitted over lossy channels. In the proposed scheme, we divide the video sequence corresponding to a group of pictures into two sub-sequences in the temporal domain and independently encode each sub-sequence with a 3-D SPIHT algorithm to generate two independent substreams. Each substream is protected by an FEC-based unequal error protection algorithm that assigns unequal forward error correction codes for each substream with bit-plane granularity. The information that is lost during transmission for one substream is estimated at the receiver by using the correlation between the two substreams and the smoothness of the video signal. Simulation results show that the proposed multiple-substream UEP algorithm is simple, fast, and robust in hostile network conditions, and that the proposed error concealment algorithm achieves about 1-3 dB PSNR gain over the case where there is no error concealment at high packet loss rates.