| Vol. 3, No. 2,December 2006 - Art. 4 |
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| Performance evaluation of FMO to improve the error resilience
of H.264/AVC |
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by
Pierpaolo Baccichet, Stanford University, Antonio Chimienti,
CNR, Emanuele Quacchio, STMicroelectronics; Enrico Magli,
Gabriella Olmo, Politecnico di Torino
Copyright
Copyright © STMicroelectronics, Politecnico di Torino,
Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca, Pierpaolo Baccichet, 2006 |
| | | Abstract
The transmission of compressed video streams over error–prone
networks requires an encoder to be equipped with error resilience
tools. The novel H.264/AVC standard supports several such tools;
in particular, it allows to group the macroblocks in a very flexible
way by means of the Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) mapping functions.
This feature is very useful in terms of robustness towards errors
and error concealment, although it introduces some source coding
overhead. In this paper we report a thorough performance assessment
of FMO for H.264/AVC video transmission over lossy packet networks.
We consider sequences in QCIF and CIF resolution, different slicing
options, and different bit-rates. We first investigate the overhead
of FMO in case of no transmission errors, and then evaluate its
performance for wireless transmission, employing a random packet
loss model, as well as UMTS error patterns. An advantage of FMO
is that, using the chessboard-like pattern, it is possible to avoid
the loss of several consecutive macroblocks, potentially improving
the error concealment performance. We introduce a simple error concealment
technique that, unlike the JVT concealment, exploits the FMO structure.
Simulation results show that FMO provides a significant performance
improvement on error-prone channels, and ad-hoc error concealment
can further enhance the end-to-end image quality. |
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