Optimal joint source-channel coding using unequal error protection for the scalable extension of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

This paper proposes an optimized joint source-channel coding methodology with unequal error protection for the transmission of video encoded with the recently developed scalable extension of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. The proposed methodology uses a simplified Viterbi-based search method which significantly outperforms the classical exhaustive search method in terms of computational complexity, leading to a practically applicable solution at the expense of a minimal loss of optimality. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our protection methodology and illustrate its capability to provide graceful degradation in the presence of channel mismatches.