Scene content driven FEC allocation for video streaming

Unequal error protection schemes applied on video data streams, considering varying importance of data packets over a group of pictures (GOP), are more efficient in terms of rate-distortion performance at different loss rates. Importance ordering policy adopted so far, mostly considered frame positions within a GOP. In the present work, we offer significant importance to the packets containing scene-transition frames, as these should be better error protected. We adopt a strategy of Forward Error Correcting (FEC) Code allocation, based on the minimization of end-to-end distortion up to the decoder, assuming that error concealment is adopted at the decoder. Two FEC allocation strategies are proposed within the Block of Packets (BOP) structure - one is an iterative modified hill climbing approach and the other is a reduced complexity heuristic approach. The Gilbert-Elliot model is used for the modeling of transmission channel. The proposed FEC allocation schemes outperform existing FEC allocation schemes in terms of PSNR for sequences with and without transitions, when transmitted over lossy channels.