Adaptive scalable wireless video coding based on unequal protection and quadtree partition

Nowadays, since the popularity of portable terminals, the demand of wireless video broadcasting is exploding. The application of wireless video has become an indispensable part of daily life. Conventional wireless video transmission systems do not accommodate the broadcasting scenarios because of the variety of channel conditions with different terminals. Recently, a joint source-channel coding scheme named SoftCast which can provide graceful degradation has been presented. But the protection for important data is not accuracy enough due to the lossy transmission. Besides, the whitening operation does not have enough flexibility which is caused by Hadamard matrix. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive wireless video coding scheme which uses quadtree partition method to achieve whitening operation. Compared with Hadamard transform, the quadtree partition method has more flexibility. Moreover, we use an adaptive module to resist the channel noise and provide more protection to important data which exist in low-frequency subband. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme is about 3–5dB better than SoftCast in reconstruction quality. And the capability of resistant to random packet loss is comparable with Hadamard transform.