Streaming from a Moving Platform with Real-Time and Playback Distortion Constraints

Video streaming from remotely controlled moving platforms such as drones have stringent constraints in terms of delay. In some applications such videos have to provide real-time visual feedback to the pilot with an acceptable distortion while satisfying high-quality requirements at playback. Furthermore the output rate of the source encoder required to achieve a target distortion depends on the speed of the platform. Motivated by this, we consider a novel source model which takes the source speed into account and derive its rate-distortion region. A transmission strategy based on successive joint encoding, which efficiently takes the source correlation into account, is then considered for transmission over a block fading channel. Our numerical results show that such scheme largely enhances over an independent coding scheme in terms of on-line distortion while approaching the playback distortion performance of an optimal encoder as the group of pictures size grows.