A video error resilient redundant slices algorithm and its performance relative to other fixed redundancy schemes

In this paper, a redundant picture formation algorithm that takes into account a given redundancy rate constraint is presented for error resilient wireless video transmission without reliance on retransmissions. The algorithm assigns priorities to macroblocks (MBs) according to two suggested metrics and ranks MBs accordingly. The first metric is based on an end-to-end distortion model and aims at maximising the reduction in distortion per redundancy bit. The end-to-end distortion accounts for the effects of error propagation, mismatch between the primary and redundancy description and error concealment. MBs providing large distortion reduction for fewer bits spent are assigned a higher priority. The second metric employs the variance of the motion vectors of a macroblock and those of its neighbouring blocks. Results show that the rate distortion metric outperforms other examined metrics by up to 2 dB. A comparison with other error resilience schemes, such as loss adaptive-rate distortion optimisation (LA-RDO) and cross packet forward error correction (FEC), is also presented. Results show that our approach outperforms the LA-RDO solution. Cross packet FEC provides better performance in the presence of random packet losses. However, results show that our approach can tackle bursty losses better. With bursty errors, the correction capabilities of the Reed-Solomon codes can be exceeded, and the availability of a coarse representation of the coded macroblocks, through a redundant slice scheme, can offer performance gains of up to 1 dB.