STUDY AND ANALYSIS OF ERROR RESILIENCE IN H.264/AVC VIDEO CODING STANDARD

Abstract

Real-time transmission of video data in network environments, such as wireless and Internet, is a challenging task, as it requires high compression efficiency and network-friendly design. To deal with these two challenges, not only the video needs to be compressed very efficiently but also the compression scheme needs to provide some error resilient features to deal with the high packet loss probability. The Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/AVC) has become a widely deployed coding technique, which aims at achieving improved compression performance and network-friendly video representation for different types of applications, such as Blu-ray Disc, Adobe Flash, Video Conferencing, and Mobile Television. H.264/AVC utilizes predictive coding to achieve high compression ratio. Predictive coding also makes H.264/AVC bitstreams vulnerable to transmission errors, as prediction incurs temporal and spatial propagation of the degradations caused by transmission errors. Due to the delay constraints of real-time video communication applications, transmission errors cannot usually be tackled by reliable communication protocols. Yet, most networks are susceptible to transmission errors. Consequently, error resilience techniques are needed to combat transmission errors in real-time H.264/AVC-based video communication: The aim of this dissertation is to study in details the error resilient features of H.264/AVC in real-time video communication applications. A part of the work presented in this dissertation was targeted at specific features of the H.264/AVC standard, including slice structuring, intra placement and weighted prediction. Computer simulations were performed to investigate the performance of H.264/AVC standard incorporating the above mentioned features.