Interleaved forward error correction for variable bit rate video coding

This paper proposes an interleaved forward error correction method for variable bit rate (VBR) video coding and quantitatively evaluates the performance under a practical usage parameter control (UPC) environment using hardware experimental VBR video coder. The proposed method is to have a timeout mechanism in the ATM adaptation layer specification (AAL) that flushes an interleave matrix which is only partially filled. The timeout flush operation is only activated when a variable bit rate video coder does not generate enough amount of bit within a given time period due to an inactive scene. The interleaving delay can be upper bounded by choosing the timeout values. This approach does not require any modification to video coders, since the regulation of the maximum delay is supported solely as an AAL function. The experimental results show that the negative impact to video quality, i.e. increase of the average quantizer step size, of the solution is small, thus proving the effectiveness of the proposed method.<<ETX>>