A Robust Video Coding Scheme for Mobile Wireless Communications

Abstract

Error resilience is an important issue when coded video data is transmitted over mobile wireless channels which are characterized by long burst of packet loss. This paper presents a robust video coding scheme to recover the lost information corrupted by burst errors. Firstly, spatial decimation divides each frame into two similar fields which can be used to correct each other by spatial error concealment. Secondly, field-level Alternative Multihypothesis Motion Compensated Prediction makes the error from even top fields and odd bottom fields decrease and converge to zero quickly and automatically. Thirdly, temporal interleaving is applied to disperse burst error to different frames. Finally, post-processing is employed to eliminate discrepancy caused by error propagation between two fields. This error concealment scheme can recover up to three to four successive lost frames to acceptable quality. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides superior subjective and objective video quality than conventional schemes in long burst packet loss environment.