Rate allocation for robust video streaming based on distributed video coding

This paper proposes an error resilient coding scheme that employs distributed video coding tools. A bitstream, produced by any standard motion-compensated predictive codec (MPEG-x, H.26x), is sent over an error-prone channel. In addition, a Wyner-ZiV encoded auxiliary bitstream is sent as redundant information to serve as a forward error correction code. At the decoder side, error concealed reconstructed frames are used as side information by the Wyner-Ziv decoder, and the corrected frame is used as a reference by future frames, thus reducing drift. We explicitly target the problem of rate allocation at the encoder side, by estimating the channel induced distortion in the transform domain. Rate adaptivity is achieved at the frame, subband and bitplane granularity. Experimental results conducted over a simulated error-prone channel reveal that the proposed scheme has comparable or better performance than a scheme where forward error correction codes are used. Moreover the proposed solution shows good performance when compared to a scheme that uses the intra-macroblock refresh procedure. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.