Systematic lossy forward error protection for video waveforms

A novel scheme for error-resilient digital video broadcasting, using Wyner-Ziv coding, is presented in this paper. We apply the general framework of systematic lossy source-channel coding to generate a supplementary bitstream that can correct transmission errors in the decoded video waveform up to a certain residual distortion. The systematic portion consists of a conventional MPEG-coded bitstream, which is transmitted over the error-prone channel without any forward error correction. The supplementary bitstream is a low rate representation of the transmitted video sequence generated using Wyner-Ziv encoding. We use the conventionally decoded error-concealed MPEG video sequence as side information to decode the Wyner-Ziv bits. The decoder combines the error-prone side information and the Wyner-Ziv description to yield an improved decoded video signal. We show how this scheme can be used to build a system which achieves graceful degradation without the need of a layered representation of the video waveform.