Distortion-aware retransmission and concealment of video packets using a Wyner-Ziv-coded thumbnail

We investigate retransmission-based robust video streaming over lossy packet networks in this paper. We propose to send a thumbnail video along with the video packets. The thumbnail video is Wyner-Ziv-coded to exploit its correlation with the primary video. The receiver decodes the primary video with the help of error concealment to mitigate packet losses. Upon receiving and successfully decoding the thumbnail, the receiver can estimate the local distortion due to packet losses and make intelligent decisions on which packets are needed for retransmission. Additional gain in video quality can be achieved by using the thumbnail to aid error concealment. Our experimental results demonstrate gains over previously proposed distortion-unaware heuristic methods.