Combined turbo coding and hierarchical QAM for unequal error protection of H.264 coded video

摘要

This paper investigates the unequal error protected (UEP) transmission of scalable H.264 bitstreams with two-priority layers, where differentiated turbo coding provides better protection for the high priority (HP) base layer than for the low priority (LP) enhancement layer. The drawback of such a method is the high overhead introduced by the channel coding, which results in a low source data rate for the HP layer, and hence lowers video quality. To overcome this problem, we introduce an efficient combination of turbo coding and hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM) to provide a high protection for the HP layer and at the same time maintaining the requisite channel coding redundancy. Simulation results show that, over a wide range of channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), our combined technique is superior to non-scalable transmission and outperforms UEP with turbo coding alone.