Optimized erasure-resilient streaming of SVC using unequal error protection

This paper proposes a real-time optimized error resilient rate allocation methodology for streaming video encoded using the recently developed scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The proposed methodology takes into account the channel requirements and the end-device specifications, and jointly extracts and protects parts of the scalable video stream in order to achieve an optimized end-to-end quality. Moreover, the level of applied erasure protection is dynamically adapted to the importance of the transmitted information. A novel signaling mechanism for forwarding these different protection levels to the decoder is presented. This mechanism introduces a low bit rate overhead compared to previously proposed RTP formats. The experimental results show that unequal error protection slightly outperforms equal error protection in terms of achieved quality when the channel conditions are exactly known. Additionally, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed protection methodology yields graceful degradation in the presence of channel mismatches.