Priority-based Error Protection for the Scalable Extension of H.264/SVC

Using the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC video coding standard, encoding a video sequence yields a quality, resolution, and frame-rate scalable bit-stream. This means that a version of the video sequence with a, lower resolution, quality and/or frame rate can be obtained by extracting selected parts of the scalable bit-stream, without the need for re-encoding. In this way, easy adaptation of the video material to the end-users' device (computational power and display resolution) and channel characteristics is possible. In this paper, the use of unequal error protection (UEP) for error-resilient transmission of H.264/SVC-encoded video sequences is studied. By using unequal error protection, graceful degradation of the video quality is achieved when the targeted packet loss probability is exceeded. In contrast, using equal error protection (EEP), an immediate and dramatic drop in quality is observed under these conditions.