Adaptive H.264 video coding for low-complexity decoding in packet-loss environment

The state-of-the-art H.264 video coding standard enables significant improvement of compression performance compared with previous standards; however, the computational complexity at both encoder and decoder are inevitably increased. In this paper, we propose an adaptive H.264 video encoding scheme to reduce the decoding complexity based on an end-to-end distortion model, especially considering its transmission over wireless networks. In order to yield the good rate-distortion performance under power constraint in packet loss environment, we generate the lightweight bit-stream at encoder side, which can be decoded with less interpolation operations. Moreover, channel distortion caused by the instability of network is considered in the proposed model. The experiment results show that the proposed method performs well in both error free and packet loss environments, while the complexity in video decoding is significantly reduced.