A Novel Approach to Joint Source-Channel Coding for Scalable Video Transmission

Video source coding and transmission may both cause distortion of the video content, and these two types of distortions usually influence each other. There is a fundamental tradeoff between them for achieving the best video transmission quality. We analyze the effect of the source coding distortion and transmission distortion to video quality, and propose a video transmission scheme based on fountain code and unequal protection. A rate distortion model is presented to formulate the video transmission system in a bandwidth limited network. The unequal protection for different layers of scalable video coding is investigated, and an algorithm that can be used to determine the source rate of the video coding and the redundancy amount assigned to each layer is proposed. The experimental results show that, using this method, the optimal quality of video transmission can be achieved and the distortion of the video transmission can be reduced dramatically.