A comparative preprocessing study for softcast video transmission

Overview & Synopsis

An original wireless video transmission scheme called SoftCast has been recently proposed to deal with the issues encountered in conventional wireless video broadcasting systems such as cliff effect. In this paper, we first review the SoftCast scheme. We then analyze and compare two simple preprocessing methods that help to increase the quality at the receiver side. Each method consists of the subtraction of either the 8-bit mean gray level 128 or the mean value of all pixels for each video frame. Preprocessing methods are compared and evaluated under different channel signal-to-noise ratios using two metrics: Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural SIMilarity (SSIM). Simulation results clearly highlight the importance of the preprocessing block in a SoftCast wireless video transmission scheme. Depending on the video input characteristics, an improvement of the PSNR score up to 2.1dB and 2.5dB can be observed for the average gray level method and for the mean frame method, respectively.