Robust H.263 Video Coding for Transmission Over the Internet

        The widely popular World Wide Web along with advances in desktop computers has brought the world into a new age of computing and communications. Low bit-rate video applications across the Internet are quickly emerging. The ITU-T H.263 standard was designed for low bit-rate video conferencing across phone lines and is an ideal candidate to be extended for Internet video applications. A primary issue in transmitting compressed video streams over the Internet is to achieve fast recovery from packet losses while maintaining a smooth bandwidth profile. This paper focuses on the error robustness issue of compressed H.263 video streams. The traditional approach of inserting intra-coded frames increases the error resilience at the expense of bursty output traffic, lower picture quality, and uneven frame dropping. By extending the macroblock force update feature of the H.263 standard, we developed a scheme that complies with the standard and increases the robustness of the video stream. This macroblock updating scheme analyzes the temporal dependencies of macroblocks in successive frames and selectively updates the macroblocks which have the most impact on later frames. The performance evaluation of the proposed technique demonstrates that it achieves a good balance between error recovery speeds and video quality.

        IEEE Infocom '98 - The Conference On Computer Communications, v. 1-3: Gateway to the 21st Century, IEEE, NewYork, NY, p. 225-232

By: Marc Willebeek-LeMair, Zon-Yin Shae and Yuan-Chi Chang

Published in: RC20532 in 1996

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