Combined wavelet video coding and error control for internet streaming and multicast

Abstract

In the past several years, advances in Internet video streaming have been tremendous. Originally designed without error protection, Receiver-driven layered multicast (RLM) has proved to be a very effective scheme for scalable video multicast. Though some efforts have been made to provide efficient error control for RLM over the Internet, there's no interaction between scalable source coding and error control mechanism. This design philosophy is obviously not optimal. This thesis takes an integrated approach toward Internet video streaming and multicast based on combined wavelet video coding and error control. We design a packetized wavelet video (PWV) coder, by incorporating packetization and layered coding, to facilitate its integration with error control. The PWV coder produces packetized layered bitstreams that are independent among layers while being embedded within each layer. Thus a lost packet only renders the following packets in the same layer useless. Based on the PWV coder, we search for a multi-layered error control strategy that optimally trades off source and channel coding for each layer under a given transmission rate constraint to mitigate the effects of packet loss. Both FEC and hybrid FEC/pseudo ARQ schemes have been analyzed and the optimal solutions have been found. Experimental results show that our combined approach outperforms previous separate designs and the reconstruction quality of the transmitted video is improved. Besides, our JSCC design applies equally to unicast and multicast.