Source Level Protection for HEVC Video Coded in Low Delay Mode for Real-Time Applications

The increase in demand for video delivery over the last few years has led to a need for more compression efficiency. High efficiency video coding (HEVC) offers a better compression rate compared to the preceding standard codecs. However, the robustness of the coded stream is reduced in the low delay mode used for real-time applications. When a bitstream is transmitted over a hostile network, there is a high probability of burst network packet loss which can result in the loss of the entire frame. To deal with these signal degradations that occur in the transmission channel, an HEVC encoder adaptation scheme based on spatial multiple description coding (MDC) is proposed. A comparative study with the single description coding (SDC) scheme has shown its efficiency in improving the quality of the reconstructed video in the five packet loss cases studied and yields an average gain of about 14 to 35.57%.