Joint source-channel decoding of motion-information using maximum-a-posteriori

The motion compensation is one of the most important mechanisms in the context of video coding, allowing the efficient coding of temporal information. Video coding standards have been using entropy coding for motion information which is more prone to transmission errors than fixed-length coding. In this paper, we propose a joint source-channel decoding (JSCD) scheme for robustly decoding motion vectors, enabling the traditional usage of motion compensation in noisy channel scenarios while still maintaining a good coding efficiency. At the encoder, motion vectors are simply coded using scalar quantization enabling scalable video coding setups. The decoder then tries to recover corrupted motion vectors by means of a maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) estimation. This scheme works in open-loop mode, not requiring feedback from the decoder, which is equally important for noisy channel environments. Because some of the coding complexity is brought from the encoder to the decoder, this scheme can be employed in nontraditional applications like video streaming from low power mobile peers.