Performance analysis of H.264/AVC video transmission with unequal error protected turbo codes

In this paper we evaluate the performance of layered (data partitioned and SNR scalable) H.264/AVC video transmission using turbo-codes to provide unequal error protection (UEP) over Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channels. In UEP schemes, the more important layers have better error protection than the others. For instance, the base layer (or motion vectors) needs stronger error protection than the enhancement layers (or residual data). Three conclusions are drawn. 1) The results for Gaussian and Rayleigh fading channels show that UEP provides better objective quality (PSIVR) than an equal error protection (EEP) for poor channels for both SNR scalability and data partitioning. However, EEP yields better objective quality than UEP when channel conditions are good. 2) SNR scalability provides considerably better PSNR than data partitioning for almost the entire E_b/N₀ region. 3) In the poor E_b/N₀ region, transmitting the enhancement layer makes only a small contribution to the quality of the image. Based on these observations, we propose a novel adaptive turbo-code with a temporal diversity scheme for transmitting a video stream encoded by SNR scalable H.264.