Unequal error protection for motion compensated video streaming over the Internet

This paper presents an unequal error protection scheme for motion compensated video over the Internet. The forward error correction (FEC) codes are optimally assigned to different frames in group of picture (GOP) by exploiting the temporal dependency among frames. To achieve optimal allocation of FEC assigned in GOP, we propose a performance criterion for the measurement of allocation, namely the expected length of error propagation (ELEP), which makes sense intuitively, as fewer frames corrupted implies better quality of reconstruction. Experiment results show the proposed 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 probability of an Internet connection increases.