Data partitioning and reversible variable length codes for robust video communications

Low bit-rate multimedia communication over wireless channels has received much attention recently. A key challenge in low bit-rate wireless communication is the very high error rate during transmission. This demands error resilient services that exhibit graceful performance degradation while operating in a highly noisy channel. Among video, audio and other multimedia communication modalities, we focus on the error-resilient transmission of video signals over wireless channels in this paper. Specifically, efforts in developing H.263++ Annex V error resilient data partitioning with reversible variable length code (RVLC) are described in detail. The performance over error-prone channels is analyzed and the effectiveness of the syntax is demonstrated with extensive simulations