Data partitioning and coding of DCT coefficients based on requantization for error-resilient transmission of video

In this paper, 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 for Inter-coded frames, motion and macroblock header information is separated from the texture information. It can be an effective tool for the transmission of video over the 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. Conventional data partitioning algorithm for DCT coefficients is to separate a fixed number of the significant DCT coefficients from the remaining coefficients, called the spectral separation. While the spectral separation can guarantee an error resilient transmission with small overhead, the main drawback is a significant decrease in the image quality of the high priority partition, compared with that of the bitstreams without data partitioning for an equivalent bit-rate. In the proposed scheme, the quantized DCT coefficients are partitioned into an even-value approximation and the odd remainder part. We also propose a simple and efficient coding algorithm for the odd remainder part. It is shown that the proposed algorithm provides a better image quality than the conventional methods with a little overhead. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.