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Robust video communication for ubiquitous network access

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Abstract

Ubiquitous network access implies that video can be streamed to portable devices whether they are moving outdoors or docked at home. Unfortunately, broadband wireless channels and their wired alternatives present a hostile environment for video communication, which manifests itself in error bursts. This paper presents a robust application layer, channel-coding scheme suitable for data-partitioned, compressed video. Data partitioning prioritizes the more important data within a compressed bitstream. In the scheme, the more important compressed data are protected prior to communication over an access network. In particular, window-growth rateless codes are used. This form of rateless code can be incrementally scaled to reflect the importance of the data being protected. The paper gives details of the scheme for achieving this in the context of an H.264/AVC codec’s picture types and structures. The paper considers how best to apply the scheme to H.264/AVC’s data-partitioning modes in a practical manner. Simulations of error-prone channels show that the proposed unequal protection scheme achieves several dBs of improvement in video quality, when compared with equal protection. The simulations modeled both wireless and wired access networks.

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Notes

  1. An IDR picture is confusedly equivalent to an I-picture in previous standards. An I-picture in H.264/AVC allows predictive references beyond the boundary of a GoP.

  2. Because of the cumulative effect of VLC, symbols nearer the slice synchronization marker suffer less from errors than those that appear later in a bitstream.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully thank Rouzbeh Razavi and Muhammad Altaf for conducting simulations in support of the findings in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aleppo, Aleppo, Syria

    Hannadi Samek

  2. University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Martin Fleury & Mohammed Ghanbari

Authors
  1. Hannadi Samek
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  2. Martin Fleury
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  3. Mohammed Ghanbari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Fleury.

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Samek, H., Fleury, M. & Ghanbari, M. Robust video communication for ubiquitous network access. Pers Ubiquit Comput 15, 811–820 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0367-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0367-3

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