Error-Resilient Transmission for 3D DCT Coded Video

Two key challenges in video communications for both wired and wireless environments are efficient compression and effective error protection against channel errors. We consider the problem of error protection for transmitting compressed video data. Specifically, we consider unequal error protection when compression is based on the three dimensional discrete cosine transform, and devise specially tailored protection schemes suitable for video transformed using the 3D DCT. Based on the statistical and structural properties of 3D DCT coefficients, we propose different data partitioning schemes for their unequal error protection. Armed with the data partitions, we propose techniques for redundancy distribution among the data groups in a given 3D volume. Experiments are performed on transmission of real video data over AWGN channels with soft decoding. The results show the improved performance of the proposed schemes over unencoded transmission, or transmission with equal error protection. Comparative results with other proposed methods are included.