Robust wireless video transmission employing byte-aligned variable-length turbo code

Abstract

Video transmission over the multi-path fading wireless channel has to overcome the inherent vulnerability of compressed video to the channel errors. To effectively prevent the corruption of video stream and its propagation in spatial and temporal domain, proactive error controls are widely being deployed. Among possible candidates, turbo code is known to exhibit superior error correction performance over fading channel. Ordinary turbo codes, however, are not suitable to support the variable-size segment of the video stream. A version of turbo code, byte-aligned variable-length turbo code, is thus proposed and applied for the robust video transmission system. Protection performance of the proposed turbo code is evaluated by applying it to GOB-based variable-size ITU-T H.263+ video packets, where the protection level is controlled based on the joint source-channel criteria. The resulting performance comparison with the conventional RCPC code clearly demonstrates the possibility of the proposed approach for the time-varying correlated Rayleigh-fading channel. ? 2002 SPIE 0277-786X/01/$15.00.