On Packetization of Embedded Multimedia Bitstreams

We study the problem of packetizing embedded multimedia bitstreams to improve the error resilience of source (compression) codes. This problem is important because of the increasing popularity of embedded compression methodology [1]–[7] and its suitability for scalable streaming media [8], [9] over IP or/and mobile IP. We study various packetization schemes against packet erasure at both low and high bit rates. Maximizing packetization efficiency for embedded bitstreams is formulated as a discrete optimization problem and globally optimal packetization (OP) algorithms are proposed under different settings. Suboptimal packetization algorithms are also devised to reduce the complexity of the OP algorithms. In order to assess their effectiveness, the proposed packetization algorithms are used to packetize embedded image and video bitstreams with simulated packet loss. Experimental results show that our OP algorithms slightly outperforms suboptimal ones. In addition to confirming the superiority of the OP algorithms, these results also provide justification of heuristic packetization methods published in the literature [10], [11].