Optimal erasure protection for scalably compressed video streams with limited retransmission on channels with HD and bursty loss characteristics

We show how the Priority Encoding Transmission (PET) framework may be leveraged to exploit both unequal error protection and limited retransmission, for RD optimized delivery of streaming media. Previous work on scalable media protection with PET has largely ignored the possibility of retransmission. We focus on sources which can be modeled as independently compressed frames, where each element of each frame can be transmitted in one or both of two transmission slots. An optimization algorithm determines the level of protection for each element in each slot, subject to transmission bandwidth constraints. To balance the protection assigned to elements being transmitted for the first time with those being retransmitted, the proposed algorithm formulates a collection of hypotheses concerning its own behaviour in future transmission slots. Experimental results are reported using both IID and GE channel models, with a Motion JPEG2000 video source, demonstrating substantial performance benefits from the proposed framework.