Efficient error resilient algorithm for H.264/AVC: mobility management in wireless video streaming

Abstract

The H.264/AVC standard introduces enhanced error robustness capabilities enabling resilient and reliable transmission of compressed video signals over wireless lossy packet networks. Those robustness capabilities are achieved by integrating some new error resilience tools that are essential for a proper delivery of real-time video services. Those tools include the Intra Refreshing (IR), Arbitrary Slice Ordering (ASO), Sequence Picture Parameter Sets (PPS), Redundant Slices (RS) tools and Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO). This paper presents an error resilient algorithm in wireless H.264/AVC streaming. The proposed method merges Reference Frame Selection (RFS), Intra Redundancy Slice and Adaptive Intra Refreshment techniques in order to prevent temporal error propagation in error-phone wireless video streaming. The coding standards only specify the decoding process and the bitstream syntax to allow considerable flexibility for the designers to optimize the encoder for coding performance improvement and complexity reduction. Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed encoding algorithm outperforms the conventional H.264/AVC standard. Both subjective and objective visual quality comparative study has been also carried out in order to validate the proposed approach. The proposed method can be used and integrated into H264/AVC without violating the standard.