The Impact of H.264 Non-Desynchronizing Bits on Visual Quality and its Application to Robust Video Decoding

In this paper, the concept of non-desynchronizing bits (NDBs) is defined in the context of H.264 video as a bit whose inversion does not cause desynchronization at the bitstream level or change the number of decoded macroblocks. We established that, on the whole, NDBs make up about a third (about 30 %) of a bitstream, and that their flipping effect on visual quality is mostly insignificant. In most cases (90 %), the PSNR value obtained when modifying an NDB is very close to the intact value. The performance of the proposed non-desync-based decoding framework, which retains a corrupted packet, under the condition of not causing desynchronization, has been compared to the JM-FC and a state-of-the-art concealment approach using the STBMA approach, and on average, respectively, provides 3.5 dB and 1.42 dB gain over them.