An error resilient coding scheme for H.264/AVC video transmission based on data embedding

For entropy-coded H.264/AVC video frames, a transmission error in a codeword will not only affect the underlying codeword but also may affect subsequent codewords, resulting in a great degradation of the received video frames. In this study, an error resilient coding scheme for H.264/AVC video transmission is proposed. At the encoder, for an H.264/AVC intra-coded I frame, the important data for each macroblock (MB) are extracted and embedded into the next frame by the proposed MB-interleaving slice-based data embedding scheme for I frames. For an H.264/AVC inter-coded P frame, two types of important data with different error recovery capabilities for each MB are extracted and embedded into the next frame by the proposed MB-interleaving slice-based data embedding scheme for P frames. At the decoder, if the important data for a corrupted MB can be correctly extracted, the extracted important data for the corrupted MB will facilitate the employed error concealment scheme to conceal the corrupted MB; otherwise, the employed error concealment scheme is simply used to conceal the corrupted MB. As compared with some recent error resilient approaches based on data embedding, in this study, the important data selection mechanism for different types of MBs, the detailed data embedding mechanism, and the error detection and concealment scheme performed at the decoder are well developed to design an integrated error resilient coding scheme. Additionally, two types of important data with different transmission error recovery capabilities for each MB in P frames can provide more reliable error resiliency. Based on the simulation results obtained in this study, the proposed scheme can recover high-quality H.264/AVC video frames from the corresponding corrupted video frames up to a video packet loss rate of 20%.