An error sensitivity-based redundant macroblock strategy for robust wireless video transmission

Packet video transmission over wireless networks suffers packet loss due to either temporary link outages or fading-induced bit errors. Such packet losses often occur in bursts, which may cause substantial degradation to the transmitted video quality. In this study, a redundant macroblock strategy is proposed. MB (macroblock) PSNR is employed to evaluate the error sensitivity of MBs. The most sensitive MBs are transferred in separate additional slices while coarsely quantized copies of the MBs are placed in the original slice. When working with chessboard style FMO (flexible macroblock reordering) and fixed length slice mode (FMO-slicing), the scheme performs well against packet loss errors with acceptable overhead and it is highly compatible with original H.264 bitstream. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can improve the decoded video quality by 0.8-2.5 dB comparing to H.264 chessboard FMO-slicing scheme over the simulated wireless channel.