Rate-distortion models for unequal error protection for wireless video transmission

Unequal error protection (UEP) was proved to be particularly suited for video transmission over error prone channels. A critical research issue consists in the the optimal choice, in terms of minimum distortion, of the partitions channel coding rates, given a total rate constraint. Here, a simple method for the choice of the rates of each partition is given and the dependency among partitions is considered. We propose a simple model to characterize the distortion produced by errors in different partitions, taking into account the characteristics of each sequence. Furthermore, the scheme is adapted to channel conditions. The method is here applied to the case of MPEG-4 video transmission. Results show that a high gain in PSNR may be achieved with the proposed UEP scheme compared to classical equal error protection.