In this thesis, the target scheme is a reliable, or, more precisely, robust video transmission system, which operates over the Internet. The system should be able to provide acceptable video output even when operating under unfavourable conditions, where not all encoded information is received at the decoder.
The inherent redundancy of video information is effectively removed by video coding algorithms. Apart from making the resulting bitstream more sensitive to errors, this removes a lot of information that could help the receiver to recover potential losses of information. The common remedy for this problem is to trade error-resilience for video coding compression efficiency by intentionally adding redundancy or using retransmission. Moreover, picture enhancing techniques are applied at the receiver to make errors less noticeable.
There is a plethora of available techniques which can be combined in many different ways in order to design the above robust schemes. This work aims to point out which are more appropriate for the target scheme, by identifying technology matches and mismatches, categorising applications, determining requirements, spotting possible design flaws and pitfalls, and proposing end-to-end solutions.
In order to support the arguments expressed in the above design stage, and as a case study, a subset of the above proposals is applied to a H.263 encoder and experimental results are obtained. Should the latter confirm the validity of the most of these suggestions, it will be considered that this work has achieved its main goals.