Systematic lossy forward error protection for error-resilient digital video broadcasting

We present a novel scheme for error-resilient digital video broadcasting, using the Wyner-Ziv coding paradigm. We apply the general framework of systematic lossy source-channel coding to generate a supplementary bit- stream that can correct transmission errors in the decoded video waveform up to a certain residual distortion. The systematic portion consists of a conventional MPEG-coded bitstream, which is transmitted over the error- prone channel without forward error correction. The supplementary bitstream is a low rate representation of the transmitted video sequence generated using Wyner-Ziv encoding. We use the conventionally decoded error- concealed MPEG video sequence as side information to decode the Wyner-Ziv bits. The decoder combines the error-prone side information and the Wyner-Ziv description to yield an improved decoded video signal. Our results indicate that, over a large range of channel error probabilities, this scheme yields superior video qual- ity when compared with traditional forward error correction techniques employed in digital video broadcasting.