A low complexity and efficient slice grouping method for H.264/AVC in error prone environments

In this paper, a new method is proposed for Macroblock (MB) importance classification of inter frames. Instead of selecting the most important MBs, the least important MBs are decided first. It makes use of the properties of skip mode in the H.264/AVC standard as the first step. Because the number of MBs chosen as skip mode in a frame varies, further classification is usually required. Four other different features therefore are considered to determine the Important Factor of the remaining MBs. It has been proved that the proposed method can provide good objective and subjective video quality performance, whilst also being simple and fast.