Spatially unequal error protection in video coding for low SNR channels

There is an increasing demand for video applications on mobile communication channels which are rather narrow bandwidth and low signal-to-noise ratio. Before transmission, video signals are coded to reduce the amount of data and channel coded with error correction codes to minimize the influence of noise during the data transfer. The channel coding usually sacrifices the effective bandwidth and it may result in degradation of the decoded video quality. In this paper, we propose an error protection scheme for video codes where the strength of error protection is spatially changed according to the importance of the video contents.