Content-based periodic macroblock for error-resilient transmission of H.264 video

For the compressed video, the transmission error in one frame will propagate to the following frames and the qualities of successive frames will drop seriously. In this paper, we present a new error-resilience scheme to alleviate the effect of error propagation in video transmission for the new coding standard H.264. In this new coding standard, multiple reference frame is adopted to achieve better coding efficiency than previous coding standard. By making use of the reference frame buffer in encoder, we can make some macroblocks in every p inter frame to reference the frame that is p frames interval away and these macroblocks are named as periodic macroblocks. The periodic macroblock can efficiently alleviate the error propagation between the frames that contain periodic macroblocks. The selection of periodic macroblock is based on the distortion expectation of each macroblock in every p frame. The number of periodic macroblock in every p frame can be determined by the transmission bandwidth, as the periodic macroblock will consume a little more bits. The simulation results prove that the periodic macroblocks can obviously improve the quality of video with different macroblock loss rate.