EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 71801, 12 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/71801
Research Article

Comparison of Error Protection Methods for Audio-Video Broadcast over DVB-H

Miska M. Hannuksela,1 Vinod Kumar Malamal Vadakital,2 and Satu Jumisko-Pyykkö3

1Nokia Research Center, P.O. Box 1000, Tampere 33721, Finland
2Institute of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, Tampere 33101, Finland
3Institute of Human-Centered Technology, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, Tampere 33101, Finland

Received 1 September 2006; Revised 21 February 2007; Accepted 16 April 2007

Academic Editor: Anthony Vetro

Copyright © 2007 Miska M. Hannuksela et al. 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.

Abstract

The paper discusses methods for robust audio-video broadcast over the digital video broadcasting-handheld (DVB-H) system. DVB-H includes a link-layer forward error correction (FEC) scheme known as multiprotocol encapsulation (MPE) FEC, which provides equal error protection (EEP) to the transmitted media streams. Several approaches for unequal error protection (UEP) have been proposed in the literature, and the applicability of some of them to DVB-H is analyzed in the paper. A link-layer UEP method based on priority segmentation of the media streams is chosen for more detailed analysis. According to the method, audio and the most important coded video pictures are protected by MPE-FEC more robustly compared to the remaining coded pictures. In order to compare EEP and UEP in a DVB-H environment, an error-prone DVB-H channel was simulated, audio-visual clips were sent through it, and a comprehensive subjective quality evaluation was conducted in a controlled laboratory environment. The results of the subjective evaluation revealed that the use of UEP improves the subjective quality of some test clips noticeably when the channel conditions were severe, while in other tested channel conditions and clips, UEP and EEP performed equally well.