Robust transmission of wavelet video sequence over wireless communication channels

Bit-errors in a subband of a wavelet-based video frame during network transmission affect not only lower-level subbands within the same frame but also the subsequent frames. This is because the video frame is wavelet-transformed image with multi-levels and referenced from later frames. In this paper, we propose a new motion estimation scheme for wavelet-based video called Intra-frame Motion Estimation (IME), in which each subband except the LL subband refers to the 1-level-lower subband in the same orientation within the same frame. This scheme protects video quality by confining the effects of the bit-errors of all subbands, except the LL subband, within a frame. We evaluated the performance of our proposed scheme in a simulated wireless network environment. As a result of tests, it was shown that the proposed IME algorithm performs better than MRME, a motion-compensated video coding scheme for wavelet video, in a heavy motion video sequence, while IME outperforms MRME at a high bit-rate in small motion video sequence.