An Error Resilient Scheme for MPEG-4 FGS Video over Packet Erasure Channel That Exhibits Graceful Degradation

Abstract

The Fine-Granular-Scalability (FGS) video coding framework has been adopted by the MPEG-4 standard as a streaming profile for streaming applications. However, streaming over packet erasure channels (e.g. the Internet) often suffers from arbitrary packet loss characteristics and high packet loss rates that reduce video playback quality in an unpredictable manner. Due to the inherent dependency in the basic FGS bit-stream definition, any packet losses critically affect its playback quality. To improve its resilience to error, we propose two enhancements that remove the dependency in the FGS bit-stream. Our enhancements require marginal computation and redundant information overhead, but significantly improve the error resilience of the FGS scheme. We demonstrate via experiments the effectiveness of our enhancements for Internet streaming applications.