Two-dimensional channel rate allocation for SVC over error-prone channel

The motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) based scalable video coding (SVC) provides a full scalability including spatial, temporal and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scalability with fine granularity, each of which may result in different visual effect. This paper addresses a novel approach of two-dimensional unequal error protection (2D UEP) for the scalable video with a combined temporal and quality (SNR) scalability over packet-erasure channel. The bit-stream is divided into scalable sub-bit-streams based on the structure of MCTF. Each sub-bit-stream is further divided into several quality layers. Unequal quantities of bits are allocated to protect different layers to obtain acceptable quality video with smooth degradation under different transmission error conditions. Experimental results are presented to show the advantage of the proposed 2D UEP scheme over the traditional one-dimensional unequal error protection (1D UEP) scheme