Packet loss recovery hybrid scheme for image multicast applications

In real-time multicast communication scalability, reliability, feedback implosion, and packet loss recovery are of paramount importance. In this work we have developed an efficient feedback-free, entirely receiver-driven, and reliable visual information delivery hybrid scheme (SIGMA-EC) for multicast applications over unreliable communication networks, that requires no per-receiver status at the sender. Our scheme´s encoding and decoding processing time is an order of magnitude faster than conventional FEC-based loss recovery schemes. Among other attractive features, the reconstructed image quality gets progressively better. Furthermore, we obtain all these advantages using a remarkably simple structure, both conceptually as well as computationally.