Rate-distortion models for unequal error protection for wireless video transmission

Unequal error protection (UEP) has proved to be particularly suited for video transmission over error prone channels. A critical research issue is the optimal choice, in terms of minimum distortion, of the channel coding rates of data partitions, given a total rate constraint. A simple method for the choice of the rates of each partition is given and the dependency among partitions is considered. We propose a simple model to characterize the distortion produced by errors in different partitions, taking into account the characteristics of each sequence. Furthermore, the scheme is adapted to channel conditions. The method is applied to the case of MPEG-4 video transmission. Results show that a high gain in PSNR may be achieved with the proposed UEP scheme compared to classical equal error protection.