Long Reed–Solomon codes over the prime field
GF(2^16 1) are proposed as a low overhead channel code for
reliable transmission of video over noisy and lossy channels. The
added redundancy is near optimal from the information theoretic
point of view contrary to the conventionally used intra-coding
and sync (marker) insertion in video transmission that are not
justified theoretically. Compared to known source-channel coding
methods, we have achieved the quality of the output of source
coder by providing nearly error free transmission. (By nearly
error free we mean an arbitrarily small error probability.) The
price paid for such remarkable video quality improvement and
relatively low complexity is long delay due to long codes. However,
the incurred delay is justifiable for Internet low bit video transmission
and in high quality video broadcasting systems like streaming
MPEG2 video where each encoder and decoder may have three
frames delay. The proposed method surpasses the previous works
for video transmission over binary symmetric channels, bursty
channels, and packet loss channels. Also we propose a nearly error
free transmission system for Gaussian channels for completeness
of the work. We have also proposed short codes, which with
larger overhead provide nearly error free transmission, and still
outperform the previous works.