Enabling low-bandwidth wireless video transmission systems

Wireless video transmission is challenging due to limited bandwidth and error-prone nature of the wireless networks. Although the latest video coding standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), has a high compression ability, the compressed bitstreams are extremely vulnerable to channel errors. For robust transmission of such compressed videos, video applications may utilize specific characteristics of the video content, known as region-of-interest (ROI). With the introduction of new coding features in HEVC, such as tiles, an unequal error protection (UEP) scheme aiming to enhance the quality of the important regions can be considered. In this paper, an adaptive ROI based UEP scheme is proposed to protect HEVC compressed video bitstreams in wireless networks. In order to determine the important regions, motion activity of different tiles in a video frame is represented by motion density (MD). Compared to previous methods, motion density has better capability to extract the importance of small details in a video. Simulation results suggest that the proposed UEP scheme achieves better objective quality, compared to conventional UEP approaches.