Robust Video Transmission Over Packet Erasure Wireless Channels Based on Wyner-Ziv Coding of Motion Regions

This paper presents a new scheme for robust video transmission over packet erasure wireless channels based on Wyner-Ziv coding of motion regions. The multipath fading and shading of the wireless channels usually lead to loss or erroneous video packets which on occasions result in some spontaneous drop in video quality. Existing approaches with forward error correction (FEC) and error concealment have not been able to provide the desired robustness in video transmission. We develop a new scheme with a motion-based Wyner-Ziv coding (MWZC) by leveraging distributed source coding (DSC) ideas for error robustness. This new scheme is based on the fact that motion regions of a given video frame are particularly important in both objective and perceptual video quality and hence should be given preferential Wyner-Ziv coding based embedded protection. To achieve high coding efficiency, we determine the underlining motion regions based on a rate-distortion model. Within the framework of H.264/AVC specification, motion region determination can be efficiently implemented using flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) and data partitioning (DP). The bit stream generated by the proposed scheme consists two parts: the systematic portion generated from conventional H.264/AVC bit stream and the supplementary bit stream for error robust video transmission generated by the Wyner-Ziv coding of motion regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms both decoder-based error concealment (DBEC) and conventional FEC with DBEC approaches.