(A) new data partitioning and an efficient fine granularity scalable coding scheme for error-resilient video transmission

Abstract

Transmitting digital video over Internet or wireless channels encounters two major problems: bandwidth fluctuation and packet-loss or errors. It is very desirable to have a video-coding scheme that can adapt to the channel conditions and recover gracefully from packet-losses or errors. Some of the possible solutions to these problems are scalability and error-resilient coding. In this dissertation, we investigate two major issues related to error resilient scalability coding. For error resilience, a new method of data partitioning of DCT coefficients is introduced, and a new fine granular scalability (FGS) coding scheme in DCT domain is proposed for scalability Firstly, we propose an efficient data partitioning and coding algorithm for an error-resilient transmission of DCT coefficients in error prone environment. In the typical data partitioning used in the conventional coding standards such as H.263++ and MPEG-4, motion and macroblock header information is separated from the texture information. It can be an effective tool for the transmission of video over error prone environment. For Intra-coded frames, however, the loss of DCT coefficients is fatal because there is no other information to reconstruct the corrupted macroblocks by errors. In the same way, when errors occur to DCT coefficients of a video packet in Inter-coded frames, all texture information in that packet is discarded. This results in the poor image quality of high priority part. Many ideas have been proposed to further divide the DCT coefficients into two parts for error-resilience in terms of ``spectral separation``. In the spectral separation method, DCT-transformed data are separated by assigning a fixed number of visually significant DCT coefficients to a high priority part, and the remaining coefficients to a low priority part. While the spectral separation can provide an error resilient transmission with small overhead, the main drawback is a significant decrease of the image quali...