Adaptive joint source-channel coding for real-time video applications over wireless IP networks

In this work we consider the delivery of H.264-coded video over future 3G wireless IP networks and we propose an adaptive motion-based unequal error protection (UEP) video coding/transmission system which can exploit knowledge of the source material as well as the channel operating conditions. Given this information, the proposed system can adaptively adjust the operating parameters of the video source encoder and the forward error correction (FEC) channel encoder to maximize the delivered video quality based upon both application-layer motion estimates and link-layer channel estimates. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using the ITU-T H.264 video source coder and the results indicate that a significant performance improvement, measured in terms of end-to-end PSNR, can be achieved compared to representative non-adaptive approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this adaptive motion-based scheme can provide comparable performance to an R-D optimized adaptive comparison system, but with substantially reduced computational complexity.