A New Lossless FMO Removal Scheme for H.264 Videos

This paper describes a lossless scheme to transcode FMO-encoded H.264 videos at the receiver for playback by any H.264 decoder/player. The proposed scheme works in the compressed domain and does not require extended computations or storage. Moreover, it is capable of modifying the slice structure when slices are lost during the transmission and is frame-based which makes it suitable for live video streaming applications. We first describe the FMO removal process at the receiver and then demonstrate, via actual implementation, the tradeoffs in terms of the relative overhead for decoding different FMO types under varying degrees of packet losses. We also present a novel method that accurately predicts the average overheads for storage space considerations on the receiving device. The scheme also allows the reduction of the sizes of videos encoded with several slices once received. Our results show that FMO Type 1 incurs the highest relative overheads and these overheads should be managed carefully, especially in a network environment with high losses.