Adaptive Error Protection for Scalable Video Coding Extension of H.264/AVC

This paper presents an adaptive error protection method which provides different packet correction capacities by using only one Reed-Solomon code. The proposed method can be applied separately for each data part in a bit stream. The adaption of the error correction capacity works on-the-fly and only based on the way of data interleaving. In this work, the error protection is applied unequally to data units in the Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC. Simulation results show that the video quality increases 6 dB in average with the total overhead of ca. 9%. The adavantage of our method is the simpleness and flexibility to apply. Therefore, it is suitable for real-time streaming applications.