This article is part of the series Multimedia Communications over Next Generation Wireless Networks.

Open Access Research Article

Embedding Protection Inside H.264/AVC and SVC Streams

Catherine Lamy-Bergot* and Benjamin Gadat

Author Affiliations

THALES Land and Joint Systems, RCP/DT and EDS/SPM Departments, 92704 Colombes, France

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2010, 2010:729695 doi:10.1155/2010/729695


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2010/1/729695


Received:30 March 2010
Revisions received:2 July 2010
Accepted:26 August 2010
Published:30 August 2010

© 2010 Catherine Lamy-Bergot and Benjamin Gadat.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A backward compatible error-protection mechanism embedded into the H.264 (AVC or SVC) syntax is described. It consists of the addition into the H.264 bitstream of supplementary network abstraction layer (NAL) units that contain forward error-correction (FEC) data generated by a block error-correction code. The proposed mechanism allows to leave the original information bits and NAL units intact and does not rely on any side information or extra signalling coming from lower layers, ensuring backward compatibility with the standard syntax. Simulation results obtained with Reed-Solomon and Low-density parity check error-correcting codes show significant improvements for both erroneous and lossy transmission channel configurations.

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