Rate-distortion based mode selection for video coding over wireless networkswith burst losses

Video communications over wireless networks suffer various patterns of losses, including both random packet loss and burst losses. Previous error resilient techniques simply consider the average packet loss rate to enhance error robustness for video transmission. However, loss patterns, specifically burst losses, have great impact on video quality. In this paper, we propose a method that can take account of both random and burst losses to further improve the error resilience of video coding. Our method estimates the end-to-end distortion based on recursive optimal per-pixel estimate (ROPE) including both random and burst losses, and applies it for rate-distortion (RD)-based optimal mode selection. We apply our method in two cases: For single description video coding, we estimate the reconstructed pixel values for random packet loss and burst losses, and calculate the overall distortion. For multiple description video coding, we estimate the end-to-end distortion for multiple state video coding (MSVC) by considering the network conditions and multiple state recovery to reduce the error propagation due to packet loss in both descriptions for MSVC. Simulation results show that our proposed method achieves better performance than MSVC and original ROPE (only considering average packet loss rate) over wireless networks with burst losses.