A joint source and channel coding approach for progressively compressed 3-D mesh transmission

In this paper, we present an unequal error protection (UEP) method for packet-loss resilient transmission of progressively compressed 3-D meshes. The proposed method is based on a source and channel coding approach where we set up a theoretical framework for the overall system by which the channel packet loss behavior and the channel bandwidth can be directly related to the decoded mesh quality at the receiver. In particular, we develop a statistical distortion measure and optimize it to compute the best combination of (i) the number of triangles to transmit, (ii) the total number of channel coding bits, and (iii) the distribution of the correction coding bits among the transmitted layers in order to maximize the decoded mesh quality at the receiver. The proposed method differs from the earlier approaches [1] in two major aspects: (i) determination of the number of channel coding bits ( ) and (ii) source rate reduction approach to accommodate for the channel coding bits. In [1], is assumed to be given, whereas the proposed method computes the optimal . Also, the approach in [1] uses coarser quantizers to reduce the number of source coding bits while here we send fewer triangles while keeping the geometry precision fixed. Experimental results show that with the proposed unequal error protection (UEP) approach, the decoded mesh quality degrades more gracefully (compared to either no error protection (NEP) or equal error protection (EEP) methods) as the packet loss rate increases.