Unequal loss protection for FGS video transmission under bandwidth constrained channel

To minimize the video transmission distortion on a bandwidth-limited network path with packet loss,an unequal loss protection(ULP) strategy was proposed for MPEG-4 fine granularity scalability(FGS) coding video stream.Video data were protected using forward error correction(FEC) scheme in the strategy.By exploiting the different significance existing in FGS video enhancement layers, different number of redundant data was allocated for different enhancement layers.Strongest protection was assigned for the most significant layers while weaker protection was assigned for the less significant layers.A relationship model of FGS video rate-distortion and average packet loss ratio was established,the optimal FEC data allocation algorithm was designed.Simulation results in network simulator(NS-2) show that the proposed error protection strategy can effectively reduce the video distortion and the variation of video quality.The strategy can achieve 1.5 dB gains under average packet loss ratio of 10%.