Rate-distortion optimized unequal loss protection for video transmission over packet erasure channels

•Accurate packet-level distortion prediction is essetial in Unequal Loss Protection (ULP).•Optimal ULP allocation is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with packet priority and dynamic channel conditions jointly considered.•Contributions of video packets in unsuccessfully decoded BOPs are explicitly considered rather than ignored in existing methods.•Particle Swarm Optimization-based evolutionary algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal ULP allocation.•Superior performance over existing methods and up to 2 dB gain in the reconstructed video quality is registered.

Video transmission over networks often suffers from packet loss due to network congestions and stringent end-to-end delay constraints. In this paper, we develop a Rate-Distortion optimized Unequal Loss Protection (RD-ULP) scheme to combat packet loss. Based on packet-level transmission distortion modeling, we estimate the amount of contribution of each video packet to the reconstructed video quality, which defines the priority level of each packet. Unequal amounts of protection are then allocated to different video packets according to their priority levels and the dynamic channel conditions. The proposed RD-ULP resource allocation problem is formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem. An optimization algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is then developed to solve the optimal resource allocation problem. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RD-ULP scheme, which outperforms existing methods by up to 2 dB in the reconstructed video quality.