Error statistical analysis of H.263 syntactical elements

The purpose of our work is to report a solution for the problem of the Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) of the H.263 bit stream to be transmitted through error prone channels. Our investigations led us to classify the H.263 syntactical elements into several classes of different significance. By identifying the most sensitive elements we developed a data partitioning (DP) technique which exhibits improved error resilience. A good reconstructed video quality is obtained for a constant 64 kbit/s transmission rate using Rate Compatible Punctured Convolutional (RCPC) codes of different rates for forward error protection. By exploiting the different syntactical element sensitivities we presented an Unequal Error Protection (UEP) scheme that surpasses the optimal Equal Error Protection (EEP). The forward error correction adopted has resulted in PSNR improvements over 20 dB for bit error rates higher than of 4x10(-3).