An error resilient coding scheme for H.263 video transmission based on data embedding

For entropy-coded H.263 video frames, a transmission error in a codeword will not only affect the underlying codeword but may also affect subsequent codewords, resulting in a great degradation of the received video frames. In this study, an error resilient coding scheme for real-time H.263 video transmission is proposed. The objective of the proposed scheme is to recover high-quality H.263 video frames from the corresponding corrupted video frames.

At the encoder, for an H.263 intra-coded I frame, the important data (the codebook index) for each macroblock (MB) are extracted and embedded into another MB within the I frame by the proposed data embedding scheme for I frames. For an H.263 inter-coded P frame, the important data (the coding mode and motion vector information) for each group of blocks (GOB) are extracted and embedded into the next frame by the proposed MB-interleaving GOB-based data embedding scheme. At the decoder, after all the corrupted MBs within an H.263 video frame are detected and located, if the important data for a corrupted MB can be extracted correctly, the extracted important data will facilitate the employed error concealment scheme to conceal the corrupted MB. Otherwise, the employed error concealment scheme is simply used to conceal the corrupted MB. As compared with some recent error resilient approaches, in this study the important data selection mechanism for different types of MBs, the detailed data embedding mechanism, and the error detection and concealment scheme performed at the decoder are well developed to design an integrated error resilient coding scheme. Based on the simulation results obtained in this study, the performance of the proposed scheme is better than those of four existing approaches used for comparison. The proposed scheme can recover high-quality H.263 video frames from the corresponding corrupted video frames up to a video packet loss rate of 30% in real time.