ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2012, Vol. 10 ›› Issue (2): 49-56.

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Low-Complexity Error-Control Methods for Scalable Video Streaming

Zhijie Zhao and Jörn Ostermann   

  1. Institut für Informationsverarbeitung Leibniz Universit?t, Hannover D-30167, Germany
  • Received:2012-01-17 Online:2012-06-25 Published:2012-06-25
  • About author:Zhijie Zhao(zhao@tnt.uni-hannover.de) received his MSc degree in communications and information systems from Jilin University. He is currently working towards his PhD degree at the Insitut für Informationsverarbeitung, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany. His research interests include video streaming and video coding.

    J?rn Ostermann has studied electrical engineering and communications engineering at the University of Hannover and Imperial College London. He received his Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees from the University of Hannover in 1988 and 1994. From 1988 to 1994, he was also a research assistant at the Institut für Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik and conducted research on low bit-rate, object-based analysis-synthesis video coding. From 1993 to 1994, he chaired the European COST 211 sim group coordinating research in low-bitrate video coding. From 1994 to 1995 he worked on video coding in the Visual Communications Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs. From 1996 to 2003, he was a member of Image Processing and Technology Research Team within AT&T Labs-Research. In 1998, he received the AT&T Standards Recognition Award and the ISO award. Since 2003, he has been a full professor and head of the Institut für Informationsverarbeitung at Leibniz Universit?t, Hannover, Germany. In 2007, he became head of the Laboratory for Information Technology at the same university. Since 2008, he has been the chairperson of the MPEG Requirements Group (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11). J?rn was a scholar of the German National Foundation.
    Dr. Ostermann has organized the evaluation of video tools to start defining the MPEG-4 standard. He chaired the Adhoc Group on the coding of arbitrarily-shaped objects in MPEG-4 video. He is a fellow of the IEEE and member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing. He has been the chair of the IEEE CAS Visual Signal Processing and Communications (VSPC) Technical Committee and has also been a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society. He has published more than 100 research papers and book chapters. He is coauthor of a graduate-level text book on video communications and holds more than 30 patents.

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Abstract: In this paper, low-complexity error-resilience and error-concealment methods for the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC are described. At the encoder, multiple-description coding (MDC) is used as error-resilient coding. Balanced scalable multiple descriptions are generated by mixing the pre-encoded scalable bit streams. Each description is wholly decodable using a standard SVC decoder. A preprocessor can be placed before an SVC decoder to extract the packets from the highest-quality bit stream. At the decoder, error concealment involves using a lightweight decoder preprocessor to generate a valid bit stream from the available network abstraction layer (NAL) units when medium-grain scalability (MGS) layers are used. Modifications are made to the NAL unit header or slice header if some NAL units of MGS layers are lost. The number of additional packets that a decoder discards as a result of a packet loss is minimized. The proposed error-resilience and error-concealment methods require little computation, which makes them suitable for real-time video streaming. Experiment results show that the proposed methods significantly reduce quality degradation caused by packet loss.

Key words: error resilience, error concealment, SVC, MDC