A Tutorial and Review on Inter-Layer FEC Coded Layered Video Streaming

Layered video coding creates multiple layers of unequal importance, which enables us to progressively refine the reconstructed video quality. When the base layer (BL) is corrupted or lost during transmission, the enhancement layers (ELs) must be dropped, regardless whether they are perfectly decoded or not, which implies that the transmission power assigned to the ELs is wasted. For the sake of combating this problem, the class of inter-layer forward error correction (IL-FEC) solutions, also referred to as layer-aware FEC (LA-FEC), has been proposed for layered video transmissions, which jointly encode the BL and the ELs, thereby protecting the BL using the ELs. This tutorial aims for inspiring further research on IL-FEC/LA-FEC techniques, with special emphasis on the family of soft-decoded bit-level IL-FEC schemes.