VLC/FLC data partitioning with intra AC prediction disabled

Abstract

Compressed video bit stream is very sensitive to transmission errors, due to error propagation resulting from variable-length coding, differential coding, and motion compensated prediction. There exist many error-resilient techniques that can significantly improve the reconstructed video quality by reducing the spatial and temporal error propagation. In this paper, an error-resilient coding scheme that can limit the spatial error propagation with little overhead is proposed. It disables intra AC prediction and groups appropriate fixed length coded (FLC) syntaxes in a video packet (or slice) together to form a new partition. With intra AC prediction disabled, errors occurred in these FLC syntaxes will not cause spatial error propagation. This error resilient coding scheme essentially classifies the syntaxes into two categories according to whether that syntax will cause spatial error propagation when an error occurs. We evaluate the efficiency of the error-resilient coding scheme by comparing the reconstructed PSNR of the proposed coding scheme with that of the MPEG-4 coding scheme over the AWGN channel and the Rayleigh channel. Depending on the video sequence, channel coding rate and channel condition, our proposed data-partitioning scheme can achieve up to 1.8 dB PSNR gain.