Robust Decoding of H.264 Encoded Video Transmitted over Wireless Channels

Abstract

Due to its high compression efficiency, the H.264 video coder is very sensitive to impairments due to transmission over noisy channels. Most error resilience/concealment techniques provided in the H.264 standard were dealing with packet losses. In wireless environments, the proportion of corrupted packets (and thus considered as lost) may become very high. This paper shows that the H.264 decoder may be seen as a parity check decoder able to detect erroneous packets. Combined with soft estimation techniques, it allows to correct transmission errors and to reduce significantly the number of packets deemed lost. The proposed solution is compatible with the error-resilience features of H.264