Layered H.264 video transmission with hierarchical QAM

In multimedia communication systems, channel bandwidth and probability of error are the two main limitations that affect the quality of service. Therefore, in applications such as video over mobile networks, a video codec should cope with the erroneous situations of the channel as well as the bandwidth limitation. There are several techniques to make a video bitstream robust to the channel error. Layered video coding in conjunction with unequal error protection is a common method that provides error resilience. Hierarchical quadratic amplitude modulation is an efficient method that provides the unequal priority control for communication channels without adding any redundancy to the transmitted data. To generate the layers in the H.264/AVC video coding standard, the data partitioning technique has been included. Scalability is another efficient layering technique that is not entirely supported in the current specification of H.264/AVC. This paper proposes an SNR scalable scheme to adapt to the H.264/AVC codec. It contains new features that make it more efficient than the previous SNR scalable codecs. In this paper applying unequal error protection by hierarchical coding to both scalable and data partitioned bitstreams is analyzed. Simulation results show that the scalable scheme is more successful in conjunction with unequal error protection. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.