This article is part of the series Multimedia over IP and Wireless Networks.

Open Access Research Article

An Integrated Source and Channel Rate Allocation Scheme for Robust Video Coding and Transmission over Wireless Channels

Jie Song1* and KJ Ray Liu2

Author Affiliations

1 Media Connectivity Division, Agere Systems, Holmdel, NJ 07733, USA

2 Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2004, 2004:342539  doi:10.1155/S111086570430908X


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2004/2/342539


Received: 22 November 2002
Revisions received: 3 September 2003
Published: 4 March 2004

© 2004 Song and Liu

A new integrated framework for source and channel rate allocation is presented for video coding and transmission over wireless channels without feedback channels available. For a fixed total channel bit rate and a finite number of channel coding rates, the proposed scheme can obtain the near-optimal source and channel coding pair, and corresponding robust video coding scheme such that the expected end-to-end distortion of video signals can be minimized. With the assumption that the encoder has the stochastic information such as average SNR and Doppler frequency of the wireless channel, the proposed scheme takes into account robust video coding, channel coding, packetization, and error concealment techniques altogether. An improved method is proposed to recursively estimate the end-to-end distortion of video coding for transmission over error-prone channels. The proposed estimation is about 1-3 dB more accurate compared to the existing integer-pel based method. Rate-distortion optimized video coding is employed for the trade-off between coding efficiency and robustness to transmission errors.

Keywords:
multimedia communications; joint source and channel coding; wireless video

Research Article