Robust video transmission using Pyramid Vector Quantisation

Video encoders such as H.264 and VC-1 rely on variable length coding, motion estimation and intra prediction to achieve high compression ratios but, as a consequence, produce an encoded bitstream that is extremely sensitive to channel errors. Pyramid Vector Quantisation, which generates fixed length codes, has been shown to provide excellent error resilience for wireless transmission of HD video. This paper presents an efficient rate distortion optimisation algorithm for PVQ which yields impressive intra coding performance with low complexity. The compression performance of PVQ is comparable with intra-H.264 and intra-VC-1. The error resilience of PVQ is also compared with H.264 and VC-1 in a representative MIMO Wireless LAN environment, showing the superior performance of PVQ.