Scalable MPEG-4 video coding with graceful packet-loss resilience over bandwidth-varying networks

We evaluate the packet loss resilience of the MPEG-4 Fine-Granular-Scalability (FGS) video coding method for Internet streaming applications. Since unrecoverable packet losses are very common over the Internet, the focus of this study is to determine how robust the MPEG-4 FGS coding tool is under unrecoverable IP packet-losses over a wide range of connection qualities (i.e. at various bit-rates). Our extensive study was performed upon an entire set of sequences, bit-rates and packet-loss rates. As shown in this paper, under unequal packet-loss protection, FGS provides a clear advantage over non-scalable coding. If equal packet-loss protection is employed, FGS performance is still considerably better, in particular under moderate-to-high packet-loss ratios