Improved Intra Prediction for Efficient Packetization in H.264 with Multiple Slice Groups

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 is the state-of-art video compression standard that promises approximately two fold compression over the preceding popular coding standards and offers efficient network friendly syntax. In addition to the various coding tools, the H.264/AVC offers a rich set of error resilience tools. Among them flexible macro block ordering (FMO) and arbitrary slice ordering (ASO) are two important error resilient tools. But the overhead on compression efficiency increases drastically, especially in intra frames as a result of such efficient error resilient tools. This offsets the compression gains obtained using the rich set of coding tools at low operating bit rates in H.264 and still demands good coding efficiency from video coding standard for deployment in bandwidth constrained networks. This paper presents a method to improve the compression efficiency while retaining the efficient capabilities of error resilient tools. The results are presented to show the significant decrease in the overhead of FMO with scattered slice mode.