WaveCast: Wavelet based wireless video broadcast using lossy transmission

Abstract

Wireless video broadcasting is a popular application of mobile network. However, the traditional approaches have limited supports to the accommodation of users with diverse channel conditions. The newly emerged Softcast approach provides smooth multicast performance but is not very efficient in inter frame compression. In this work, we propose a new video multicast approach: WaveCast. Different from softcast, WaveCast utilizes motion compensated temporal filter (MCTF) to exploit inter frame redundancy, and utilizes conventional framework to transmit motion information such that the MVs can be reconstructed losslessly. Meanwhile, WaveCast transmits the transform coefficients in lossy mode and performs gracefully in multicast. In experiments, Wave-Cast outperforms softcast 2dB in video PSNR at low channel SNR, and outperforms H.264 based framework up to 8dB in broadcast.