Unequal error protection for robust transmission of layered video stream

Unequal error protection (UEP) for transmitting scalable image and video bit streams over packet erasure networks has been extensively studied. Most of the existing works consider UEP for a single source bitstream with chain-structure dependencies. However, in some state-of-the-art image and video coding techniques, such as MPEG-4 fine-grained scalable (FGS), there exist more complex tree-structure dependencies. In this paper, we propose a packetization framework for tree-structured bitstream, and present two rate allocation algorithms. Using MPEG-4 FGS as the source encoder, our experimental results show that the performance in terms of mean PSNR can be improved by adaptively allocating available bandwidth to different frames.