A Tutorial and Review on Inter-Layer FEC Coded Layered Video Streaming

Layered video coding creates multiple layers of unequal importance, which enables us to progressively refine the reconstructed video quality. When the base layer (BL) is corrupted or lost during transmission, the enhancement layers (ELs) must be dropped, regardless whether they are perfectly decoded or not, which implies that the transmission power assigned to the ELs is wasted. For the sake of combating this problem, the class of inter-layer forward error correction (IL-FEC) solutions, also referred to as layer-aware FEC (LA-FEC), has been proposed for layered video transmissions, which jointly encode the BL and the ELs, thereby protecting the BL using the ELs. This tutorial aims for inspiring further research on IL-FEC/LA-FEC techniques, with special emphasis on the family of soft-decoded bit-level IL-FEC schemes.

I. Prologue

SOPHISTICATED

The philosophy of LA-FEC and IL-FEC was used in [1], [2] for referring to packet-level and bit-level techniques, respectively. Consequently, we will employ LA-/IL-FEC for referring to packet-/bit-level schemes, respectively. The definitions of packet-level and bit-level notations will be given in Section III.

video processing is required for recording, production, or re-broadcasting of moving images, which has been changing our everyday life ever since the first clip was captured by a video tape recorder in 1951. Since then a number of video compression standards have been conceived for the sake of reducing the number of bits required, while retaining the fidelity of the visual information conveyed by a video clip. The achievable compression ratio has been substantially improved over the past years both as a benefit of advances in video signal processing and microelectronics. This was achieved at the cost of more complex algorithms, but fortunately the spectacular developments in low-power chip design were still capable of mitigating the power-dissipation imposed. We will briefly review the history of video compression standards in Section II-A of this treatise.