ROI-based error resilient coding of H.264 for conversational video communication

Transmission of compressed video over packet lossy networks suffers from the problem of error propagation which deteriorate the reconstruction quality of a number of successive frames. For conversational video communication, this problem becomes more severe due to the localization and predominance of the attention-attracted areas, where the motion compensated prediction errors have more energy compared to that of the relatively invariable background. In this paper, we propose an error resilient coding scheme for conversational video communication. The proposed scheme combines the region-of-interest (ROI) segmentation and the long-term reference (LTR) frame coding. The scheme can be easily integrated into the H.264/AVC encoder, and efficiently improve the video quality of the ROI areas. Simulation results verify the robustness and coding efficiency as well as improved subjective visual quality.