An error protection technique for the wireless transmission of digital cinema streams

This paper presents a forward error correction technique that can be applied to protect digital cinema streams during their transmission over wireless channels with both sparse and packet error statistics, such as those provided by satellite broadcasting and wireless MAN standards as WiMAX. To this aim, we adopt the tools of the JPEG2000 wireless (JPWL) standard, by introducing a method for unequal error protection (UEP) and a virtual interleaving technique of the stream. In this way, not only the probability of frame loss is minimized, but also the average quality of the received video stream is maximized. In particular, we show that a proper combination of Reed-Solomon coding and virtual interleaving on the image data, can greatly improve the average PSNR of the reconstructed frames, in case of transmission on both the AWGN channel and the packet-loss channel. Moreover, the protected stream is still compliant with the Digital Cinema guidelines, thus providing a complete backward compatibility.