Robust video coding over wireless channels using TRIRF inter-frame coding

In video communication systems based on motion-compensated predictive coding, transmission errors cause spatial and temporal distortion propagation during; the reconstruction of the video sequence at the receiver. Two commonly used techniques to stop error propagation are (1) periodic refreshing by intra-frame coding and (2) retransmission. However, frequent intra-frame refreshing may be expensive in band-limited applications such as wireless video transmission. On the other hand, retransmission causes additional delay which may be intolerable in real-time applications. We present a novel video coding mode which we call transmitter receiver identical reference frame (TRIRF) based inter-frame coding. Under the assumption of the existence of a feedback channel, TRIRF-frame coding constructs a new type of reference frame from the correctly received data which is made identical both at the receiver and the transmitter. Motion estimation and compensation are based on the TRIRF-frame. Simulations show that TRIRF-frame coding prevents error propagation as effectively as intra-coding but with improve compression efficiency. We also propose a packetization scheme for the encoded video bit streams which enables rapid resynchronization of the decoder