Quality driven wireless video transmission for medical applications.

Wireless telemedicine is currently a reality, requiring also the transmission of medical video sequences over often unreliable links. The contrasting requirements of almost lossless compression and low available bandwidth have to be tackled in this case. On one side compression techniques need to be conservative, in order to avoid removing perceptively important information; on the other side error resilience and correction should be provided, with the constraint of a limited bandwidth. An approach based on quality driven, network aware, joint source and channel coding is described in this paper. The approach has been developed in the framework of the IST PHOENIX project (www.ist phoenix.org), focusing on wireless multimedia transmission over IP networks. After a description of the considered cross-layer approach and of the information to be exchanged among the system component blocks, the techniques considered for this information exchange and the concept of "JSCC/D controllers" are introduced. The implementation of the demonstrator realized is then described.