Joint Source-Channel Coding for the Scalable Extension of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

In this paper, we propose a joint source-channel coding (JSCC) methodology which minimizes the end-to-end distortion for the transmission of H.264/MPEG-4 scalable video over packet loss channels. The proposed JSCC-approach employs low-density parity-check codes in order to provide channel protection and relies on Lagrangian-based optimization techniques to derive the appropriate protection levels for each layer produced by the scalable source codec. Experiments show that our JSCC methodology delivers competitive results to state-of-the-art Lagrangian-based algorithms. However, in contrast to the state-of-the-art, our approach significantly reduces the computational complexity. We conclude that the proposed JSCC methodology provides optimized resilience against transmission errors in scalable video streaming over variable-bandwidth error-prone channels.