Two-way decodable variable length data blocks for robust video transmission

In this paper a novel robust video transmission scheme is proposed that can not only decode the compressed video stream in two directions but also correct channel errors with limit burst length. Standard video coders usually utilize variable length coding (VLC) to obtain high compression ratio, which makes the compressed bit stream very vulnerable to channel errors. Even one bit error may lead to loss of synchronization with the following bits undecodable and result in error propagation. In order to limit error propagation due to VLC we put forward a new video coding scheme named as two-way decodable variable length data blocks (TDVLDB), which makes the compressed bit stream bi-directionally decodable through reversal and XOR operations. Great subjective and object quality improvements have been found in our simulation results compared with other resilient schemes, such as the reversible variable length codes (RVLC) scheme, the partial backward decodable bit stream (PBDBS) scheme and the early resynchronization (ER) scheme.