Unequal Error Protection Using Fountain Codes With Applications to Video Communication

Application-layer forward error correction (FEC) is used in many multimedia communication systems to address the problem of packet loss in lossy packet networks. One powerful form of application-layer FEC is unequal error protection which protects the information symbols according to their importance. We propose a method for unequal error protection with a Fountain code. When the information symbols were partitioned into two protection classes (most important and least important), our method required a smaller transmission bit budget to achieve low bit error rates compared to the two state-of-the-art techniques. We also compared our method to the two state-of-the-art techniques for video unicast and multicast over a lossy network. Simulations for the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC standard showed that our method required a smaller transmission bit budget to achieve high-quality video.