A systematic reallocation and prioritization scheme for error-resilient transmission of video packets

This paper proposes a novel video transmission scheme that provides error-resilient transmission of encoded video on a per-packet basis over wireless networks. In conventional schemes, the error-resilient transmission of encoded video has been conducted using the unit of a video frame or data partition. However, in order to provide higher error-resilient transmission for significant video data that critically impacts the decoding when it is lost, the unit of prioritized video transmission should be more fine-grained. Moreover, the transmission overhead incurred by the application of the prioritized video transmission should be further minimized. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a scheme that identifies and reallocates significant video data within the unit of inter-frame dependency, which is a hierarchical relationship between video frames, in order to enhance the compression efficiency such as a group of pictures. Consequently, the encoded video is transmitted with different transmission priorities on a per-packet basis depending on the packet’s significance for decoding. The evaluation results with standard definition and high definition videos demonstrate that the proposed scheme has significant performance enhancements over the conventional video frame prioritization scheme in terms of transmission overhead, transmitted video data utilization, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and subject quality test.