Wireless image and video soft transmission via perception-inspired power distortion optimization
Recently, a scheme called SoftCast has shown great potential for wireless image/video communication in the scenarios where the channel quality may fluctuate drastically and unpredictably. The transmission is lossy in nature, with its transmission power allocated among coefficients unequally to minimize the distortion. One problem is that its performance is optimized using mean square errors (MSE) as the quality metric, which is known for not matching the perception of human eyes. Inspired by the researches in image quality assessment, this paper proposes a power allocation and optimization scheme that minimizes the perceptual distortion of reconstruction image. In particular, we establish a perception model to evaluate the perceptual importance of different transform coefficients, based on the structure similarity (SSIM) image quality metric. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can improve the perceptual performance of the original SoftCast scheme.