A wireless video multicasting scheme based on multi-scale compressed sensing

Video multicast is becoming more and more popular in wireless multimedia applications, in which one major challenge is to offer heterogeneous users with a graceful degradation against varying packet loss ratios and channel noise. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale compressed sensing-based wireless video multicast scheme, abbreviated as MCS-cast. The encoder of MCS-cast decomposes each video frame through a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and explores an optimized compressed sensing (CS) rate to sample/measure each DWT level. The CS measurements are then packed in such a way that all packets are made as equally important as possible, while each packet includes different percentages of different DWT levels. Finally, the packets are transmitted via an analog-like modulator with mapping of the measurements into a very dense constellation. We demonstrate that because of larger percentages of more important DWT levels in each packet, packet loss leads to a much reduced influence on the reconstruction quality. Experimental results show that our MCS-cast preserves the property of graceful degradation for heterogeneous users and can outperform the state-of-the-art SoftCast by up to 3 dB in PSNR at high packet loss ratios (over the same noisy channel).