Forward Error Correction for Visual Communication Systems Using VBR Codec

Konomi MOCHIZUKI
Yasuhiko YOSHIMURA
Yoshihiko UEMATSU
Ryoichi SUZUKI

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E89-B    No.2    pp.334-341
Publication Date: 2006/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e89-b.2.334
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Multimedia QoS Evaluation and Management Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
forward error correction,  real-time application,  Reed-Solomon code,  VBR codec,  

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Summary: 
Packet loss and delay cause degradation in the quality of real-time, interactive applications such as video conferencing. Forward error correction (FEC) schemes have been proposed to make the applications more resilient to packet loss, because the time required to recover the lost packets is shorter than that required to retransmit the lost packets. On the other hand, the codec generally used in real-time applications like MPEG4 has the feature that the sending bit rate and the packet size of the traffic vary significantly according to the motion of an object in a video. If the traditional FEC coding, which is calculated on the basis of a fixed-size block, is applied to such applications, a waste of bandwidth and a delay variation are caused and the quality is degraded. In this paper, we propose suitable FEC schemes for visual communication systems using variable bit-rate (VBR) codec and evaluate the effectiveness of these schemes using our prototype implementation and experimental network.