Low-Complexity Error-Control Methods for Scalable Video Streaming

In this paper,low-complexity error-resilience and error-concealment methods for the scalable video coding(SVC) extension of H.264/AVC are described.At the encoder,multiple-description coding(MDC) is used as error-resilient coding.Balanced scalable multiple descriptions are generated by mixing the pre-encoded scalable bit streams.Each description is wholly decodable using a standard SVC decoder.A preprocessor can be placed before an SVC decoder to extract the packets from the highest-quality bit stream.At the decoder,error concealment involves using a lightweight decoder preprocessor to generate a valid bit stream from the available network abstraction layer(NAL) units when medium-grain scalability(MGS) layers are used.Modifications are made to the NAL unit header or slice header if some NAL units of MGS layers are lost.The number of additional packets that a decoder discards as a result of a packet loss is minimized.The proposed error-resilience and error-concealment methods require little computation,which makes them suitable for real-time video streaming.Experiment results show that the proposed methods significantly reduce quality degradation caused by packet loss.