Abstract

A general joint source-channel rate allocation scheme for a dependent video coding environment is pre-sented. It is assumed that the source coders rely on motion-compensated prediction, and thus error propaga-tion will contribute significantly to the degradation of the reconstructed video. The rate allocation methodol-ogy is based upon generation of operational distortion-rate characteristics. In order to reduce computational complexity, these surfaces and the channel code performance are modeled. An analytic method for com-puting optimal rate allocation across frames in a video sequence is then introduced. Comparisons are made between equal error protection and unequal error protection over video frames. Results are shown for H.263 compressed video used in conjunction with rate-compatible punctured convolutional codes. Index terms: Combined source/channel coding, resource allocation, video compression I.

Citations