Adaptive Multi-path Prediction for Error Resilient H.264 Coding

An adaptive reference selection (ARS) scheme is proposed to enhance error resilience performance of H.264 video in this work, where multiple prediction paths can be created in the compressed video stream at the macroblock level without a large amount of bit rate overhead. We first develop a method to measure the expected distortion at the decoder when the H.264 video is transmitted through erroneous channels. Then, we use an updated rate-distortion cost function to incorporate this measurement into the mode decision process. The best prediction for each macroblock is selected with the objective to achieve the highest expected rate-distortion performance of the GOP in the received video stream. It is shown by experimental results that error propagation is largely reduced and the quality of received video stream is improved significantly by the proposed scheme