Content-Adaptive Robust H.264/SVC Video Communications over 802.11e Networks

In this paper we present a low-complexity traffic prioritization strategy for video transmission using the H.264 scalable video coding (SVC) standard over 802.11e wireless networks.The first part of this work focuses on assessing the perceptual impact of data loss in the various enhancement layers using a wide set of H.264/SVC encoded videos.The analysis shows that perceptual impairments are highly correlated with the motion activity in the video sequence.Thus, we propose an adaptive unequal error protection strategy which identifies the most perceptually important parts of the enhancement layers in the video sequence by means of a low complexity macroblock motion analysis process.The algorithm is tested by simulating a realistic 802.11e based home network scenario.Results obtained on a large set of video sequences show that the proposed content-aware traffic prioritization strategy enables PSNR gains up to 2.5 dB as well as noticeable visual quality improvements with respect to a traditional prioritization strategy aiming at minimizing error propagation.