Unequal loss protection for robust transmission of motion compensated video over the internet

This paper presents an unequal loss protection (ULP) scheme for robust transmission of motion compensated video over the Internet. By exploiting the temporal dependency between frames, forward error correction (FEC) codes across packets are assigned to different frames in a group of pictures in the sense of minimizing the effect of error propagation, thus improving video quality significantly. To achieve optimal allocation of FEC codes, we formulate the effect of packet loss on video quality degradation as an expected length of error propagation (ELEP) model, which makes sense intuitively, as fewer frames corrupted implies better quality of reconstructed video. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed ELEP model and that the associated ULP scheme is robust to burst packet loss in the Internet. More importantly, graceful degradation of video quality is achieved by the proposed scheme as the packet loss rate of an Internet connection increases.