Unequal error protection for video streaming using delay-aware fountain codes

Recently, the forward error correction (FEC) codes are gaining popularity in video transmission community because of its capability of recovering lost packets in lossy wireless networks. The state-of-the-art scheme for FEC video transmission are the delay-aware fountain codes (DAF), which combine the ratelessness of fountain codes with the property of video coding. However, DAF assumes that all the data in the video has the same importance, thus every packet should have the equal chance to be decoded. In this work, in order to further adapt DAF to real-world video coding, we propose a method to integrate the unequal error protection (UEP) into DAF to provide additional protection for important bits. Different from the existing schemes, the proposed scheme does not impose any restriction on the importance profile, and it does not rely on any specific video coding standard. Most importantly, the proposed scheme is designed within the framework of DAF, so it neither requires any change on the DAF decoder or the protocol, nor any additional coordination between encoder and decoder. Simulation experiments show the proposed system achieves higher decoding ratios and PSNR compared to equal error protection (EEP) under the same network conditions.