The latest video coding standard, H.264/AVC, adopts 44 approximate transform instead of 88 discrete cosine transform (DCT) to avoid the inverse transform mismatch problem. However, that is only one of the factors that make it difficult to transcode pre-coded video contents with the previous standards to H.264/AVC in the common domain without causing cascaded pixel-domain transcoding. In this paper, to support the existent DCT-domain transcoding schemes and to reduce computational complexity, we propose an efficient algorithm that converts the quantized 88 DCT block into four newly quantized 44 transformed blocks. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme reduces computational complexity by 5-11% and improves video quality by 0.1-0.5 dB compared with the cascaded pixel-domain transcoding scheme that exploits inverse quantization (IQ), inverse DCT (IDCT), DCT, and re-quantization (re-Q).

Bit-errors in a subband of a wavelet-based video frame during network transmission affect not only lower-level subbands within the same frame but also the subsequent frames. This is because the video frame is wavelet-transformed image with multi-levels and referenced from later frames. In this paper, we propose a new motion estimation scheme for wavelet-based video called Intra-frame Motion Estimation (IME), in which each subband except the LL subband refers to the 1-level-lower subband in the same orientation within the same frame. This scheme protects video quality by confining the effects of the bit-errors of all subbands, except the LL subband, within a frame. We evaluated the performance of our proposed scheme in a simulated wireless network environment. As a result of tests, it was shown that the proposed IME algorithm performs better than MRME, a motion-compensated video coding scheme for wavelet video, in a heavy motion video sequence, while IME outperforms MRME at a high bit-rate in small motion video sequence.

FEC (Forward Error Correction) is widely used to recover packet loss over the Internet since it does not involve additional network delay. However, FEC still needs much additional network bandwidth for redundancy, and does not consider the priority or the importance of video frames to generate redundant data. In this paper, we present Periodic FEC (PFEC) to make up for the shortcomings of FEC. PFEC divides frames into high-priority frames and low-priority frames, and gives redundancy only to high-priority frames. As specific examples, we describe two types of PFEC: Media-Independent PFEC and Media-Dependant PFEC. Moreover, based on the two-state continuous time Markov chain, we propose redundancy control algorithms of the PFEC schemes that can adjust the amount of redundancy to optimal levels depending on network loss conditions. For better performance, we also consider UEP (Unequal Error Protection) based on PFEC that gives redundancy to low-priority frames as well as high-priority frames. Experimental results show that compared with FEC, PFEC reduces the amount of redundancy considerably but degrades PSNR slightly, and UEP based on PFEC economizes redundancy without the degradation of the PSNR.