Most existing unequal loss protection (ULP) schemes do not consider the minimum quality requirement and usually have high computation complexity. In this research, we propose a layered ULP (L-ULP) scheme to solve these problems. In particular, we use the rate-based optimal solution with a local search to find the average forward error correction (FEC) allocation and use the gradient search to find the FEC solution for each layer. Experimental results show that the executing time of L-ULP is

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... faster than the traditional ULP scheme but the average distortion is worse. Therefore, we further propose to combine the L-ULP with the pre-interleaving to have an improved L-ULP (IL-ULP) system. By using the pre-interleaving, we are able to delay the occurrence of the first unrecoverable loss in the source bitstream and thus improve the loss resilience performance. With the better loss resilience performance in the source bitstream, our proposed IL-ULP scheme is allowed to have a weaker FEC protection and allocate more bits to the source coding, which leads to the improvement of the overall performance. Experimental results show that our proposed IL-ULP scheme even outperforms the global optimal result obtained by any traditional ULP scheme while the complexity of IL-ULP is almost the same as L-ULP.