Joint source / channel coding to maximize perceptual video quality on packet networks

The QoS-guarantee in real-time communication for multimedia applications is significantly important. An architectural framework for multimedia networks based on substreams or flows are effectively exploited for combining source and channel coding for multimedia data. In this paper, firstly, we designed a source coding scheme based on wavelet transform to exploit the human visual systems's spatial and temporal characteristics of video data. Secondly, we designed a classification scheme to partition video data into multiple substreams which have their own quality of service (QoS) requirements. Finally, we designed a management (reservation and scheduling) scheme for substreams to support better perceptual video quality such as the bound of end-to-end jitter. We have shown that our joint source/channel coding scheme is better than two other schemes by simulation and a real video experiment.