Enhanced H.264 Transmission with Multiple Description Coding, Prioritised Concealment and FMO

Abstract

H.264 is presently one of the most frequently adopted video coding standards capable of achieving good video quality. Due to its enhanced compression capability, H.264 is extensively used in a wide range of applications such as Mobile TV broadcasting, video conferencing and High Definition TV. Nonetheless, compressed videos are highly sensitive to channel errors which may result in severe visual quality degradation. Therefore, transmission of compressed video over communication channels is a very challenging task. In this work, a recently developed prioritized concealment and Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) scheme were combined with Multiple Description Coding (MDC) for video transmission. The prioritised concealment algorithm used auto-correlation and the FMO scheme used Space and Time (ST) Interpolation. The FMO scheme was applied to MDC whereby ST interpolation was performed over different descriptions to enhance its performance. Moreover, a channel model that specifically considers losses on multiple channels was used to assess the performance. Simulations results show that the proposed scheme achieved a gain of 3.38 dB in YPSNR over a conventional scheme as compared to a gain of 1.94 dB in Y-PSNR, when using an existing FMO and prioritisation scheme.