Hybrid Digital-Analog Scheme for Video Transmission Over Wireless
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Hybrid Digital-Analog Scheme for Video Transmission over Wireless Lei Yu, Houqiang Li, Senior Member, IEEE, and Weiping Li, Fellow, IEEE University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract—In this paper, we propose a novel wireless video neither digital source coding nor digital channel coding tech- transmission scheme named HDA-Cast, which is a hybrid nique is adopted, have also been also proposed to avoid the digital-analog (HDA) coding scheme that integrates the advan- cliff effect and remove the unfairness in multicast, such as tages of digital coding and analog coding. Relative to most SoftCast [6], [7]. Because SoftCast does not employ predic- state-of-the-art video transmission methods, it avoids the “cliff tion coding so as to avoid error propagation, it has the graceful effect” provided that the channel quality is within the expected degradation property when channel condition becomes worse. range, gives better fairness among all receivers for multicast, However, prediction coding is one of the most efficient com- and has strong adaption to channel variation. The evaluation pression tools in the video coding scheme, so the coding effi- results show that our HDA-Cast is 3.5-9.6 dB better than the ciency of SoftCast is relatively low. SoftCast which is an up-to-date analog scheme. Owing to its strong adaption to channel variation, it can be regarded as a Besides digital scheme and analog scheme, there are some kind of wireless scalable video coding (WSVC). hybrid digital-analog (HDA) transmission schemes have been proposed in recent years [10], [11]. These schemes integrate I. INTRODUCTION digital coding techniques with analog coding techniques by With the rapid development of wireless network and mo- transmitting superposition of digital modulation signal and bile terminals, wireless video services are becoming increa- analog modulation signal or transmitting them in the way of singly important and popular, involving a number of diverse time-sharing or bandwidth-sharing. However, so far, most of applications, such as mobile TV, wireless video surveillance, the existing HDA schemes focus on theoretical study [8], [9]; mobile video telephone, mobile video conference, etc. Con- except for the VQHDA image transmission scheme in [10] ventional wireless video transmission scheme typically con- and the D-Cast video transmission scheme in [11], there is sists of separate digital video compression coding (e.g., hardly any practical HDA scheme for image or video trans- H.264/AVC) and a digital channel coding. Such a “digital- mission. D-Cast [11] is a HDA scheme for video transmission ly-coded” framework is a typical digital coding scheme, based on SoftCast. It combines separate digital coding and which inevitably faces the problems that the quality of de- SoftCast in the way of time-sharing or bandwidth-sharing. coded video is sensitive to the channel variation. Especially, Considering that the low coding efficiency of SoftCast results with the channel increasingly deteriorating, the video quality from using purely-analog scheme to coding DCT coefficients, will drop sharply when approaching certain critical point. This D-Cast employs coset coding and syndrome coding (which phenomenon is named as “cliff effect” [6]. For mobile ter- are two typical techniques used in distributed source coding) minals, the wireless channels are almost varying at all times, to code the coefficients so as to effectively reduce their am- therefore, it is not able to reconstruct the video with reliable plitudes (variances). quality. This is one of the reasons that conventional wireless Through the analysis above, the wireless video transmis- video transmission scheme is not suitable for the present sion scheme should have better performance at these three wireless video services. The other reason is that for multi- aspects: (1) Unicast Efficiency: it measures the quality of the cast/broadcast video services, the bitrate selected by conven- video transmitted from the sender to a stationary receiver. The tional wireless video transmission scheme cannot fit all re- better the received video quality is (at the same channel qual- ceivers at same time. If the video is transmitted at a high bi- ity), the higher Unicast Efficiency is; (2) Multicast (or trate, it only can be decoded by those receivers with better Broadcast) Efficiency: it measures the overall quality of the quality channels, and it is unfair for those receivers with worse video transmitted from the sender to multiple stationary re- quality channels; while if it transmits at a low bitrate sup- ceivers. It also reflects the fairness among all receivers; (3) ported by all receivers, it reduces the performance of the re- Mobility: it measures the quality of the video transmitted from ceivers with better quality channels, and it is unfair for them. the sender to one or multiple mobile receivers. The more To overcome the shortcomings of conventional scheme, gracefully the video quality varies with the channel varying, the scalable digital video transmission scheme has been pro- the higher Mobility is. posed. This kind of transmission scheme encodes the video In this paper, we propose a novel wireless video trans- with multiple levels of quality or resolution and transmitted mission scheme named HDA-Cast, which adopts HDA with unequal error protection (UEP), such as hierarchical transmission technique, integrates the advantages of digital modulation (HM) [1]-[4]. It usually uses the scalable video and analog transmissions, and overcomes the disadvantages coding (SVC) at the sender, which fragments a video stream of digital and analog transmissions. Relative to most into a base layer and several enhancement layers [5], so we state-of-the-art wireless video transmission schemes, our name this method as SVC+HM for short. HDA-Cast has better overall performance in Unicast Effi- Some analog wireless video transmission schemes, where ciency, Multicast Efficiency and Mobility. 978-1-4673-5762-3/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 1163 II. HDA-CAST the random reordering, partitioning the GOP is needed (The In order to achieve both advantages of digital and analog reasons for doing so will be clarified in the next subsection). schemes, our HDA-Cast adopts low bitrate digital scheme Here assume each GOP unit consists of frames, and is even. combined with the modified SoftCast, which can avoid the After DCT and power allocation, the͠ MSoftCast ͠encoder cliff effect on condition that the channel quality is within the divides each GOP into two parts: the first /2 frames and the expected range and make full use of the channel. last /2 frames. They are separately operated͠ by random reordering.͠ The resulting signals are denoted as ͥ and ͦ, As shown in Fig. 1, HDA-Cast consists of the digital and and they are mapped to Q (quadrature) and ͬI (in-phase)ͬ analog codec parts. At the sender side, the video is firstly components of analog vector signal respectively. Ob- encoded by H.264/AVC, and the residual is processed by the viously, the variance of ͥ is larger thanͬ ͦ. Assuming the modified SoftCast (MSoftCast); then H.264/AVC bitstream is seeds of random reorderingͬ at sender areͬ known by all the channel coded, modulated and allocated power by the sender; receivers, all the receivers can restore the initial order of the finally, the power-allocated modulation signals and the output signals by the opposite operation of random reordering. signals of MSoftCast are superposed and transmitted. At the receiver side, the decoder first decodes the digital signal ac- For the integrity of the paper, the power allocation and curately; then, it obtains the analog signals by subtracting the Linear Least Square Estimator (LLSE) in [6] employed by digital signals from the received signals; finally, it recon- MSoftCast are listed as follows: structs the video based on the part decoded by H.264/AVC and ͤ = ∙ , the part decoded by MSoftCast. ͬ ʚ͟ʛ ͛ʚ͟ʛ ͧʚ͟ʛ ∙ /2 (1) A. Digital Encoder and Decoder = ͈ ͊ , ͛ʚ͟ʛ ǰ .( ) &Ͱͥ .( ) For the digital encoder and decoder part, HDA-Cast ͟ ∑ ͟ combines H.264/AVC with channel code and modulation. In and ͤ = ͤ + , order to achieve better adaption to channel, HDA-Cast em- ͦ ploys BPSK with low rate convolutional codes [12]. ͭ ʚ͟ʛ ͬ ʚ͟ʛ .͢ʚ͟ʛ (2) = ͦ ͛ʚͦ͟ ʛ ʚ͟ʛ ͦ ͤ , B. Analog Encoder and Decoder ͧ̂ʚ͟ʛ . + ) ͭ ʚ͟ʛ ͛ ʚ͟ʛ ʚ͟ʛ ʚ͟ʛ For the analog part, HDA-Cast adopts MSoftCast pro- where is the DCT coefficients in k-th PAU, is the posed by us. Compared with SoftCast, MSoftCast changes in power allocationͧʚ͟ʛ scaling value for , ͤ is͛ theʚ͟ ʛoutput the two aspects. of power allocation for , . ͧ ʚis͟ ʛtheͬ standardʚ͟ʛ deviation of , is the numberͧ ʚof͟ʛ PAUs ʚ͟ ʛin one GOP, is the av- First, each GOP is firstly divided into ℎ × × erageͧʚ͟ powerʛ ͈ allocated to the analog vector signal͊ , ͤ blocks as transforming units (TU), and every TU is ͫdivided͠ ͦ is the received signal for ͤ , ) is the varianceͬ ͭ of ʚthe͟ʛ into ℎ × × 1 blocks as power allocation units (PAU, ʚ ʛ ʚ ʛ which is namedͫ as Chunk in SoftCast). In order to reduce the noise added into ͤ ͬ while͟ ͤ ͟ is being transmitted, complexity, DCT and IDCT are performed on each TU, in- and is the outputͭ ʚ of͟ʛ LLSE forͬ ʚ͟ʛ . stead of the whole GOP (as in SoftCast). Then, power alloca- Itͧ̂ ʚshould͟ʛ be noted that the standardͧʚ͟ʛ deviations of DCT tion is performed on all PAUs (similar to SoftCast). coefficients as the side information of MSoftCast are trans- Second, in order to guarantee the decoding performance of mitted in the digital part considering its importance to the digital coding, it needs to whiten the output signals of MSoftCast decoding.