Enhanced video coding with error resilience based on macroblock data manipulation

Abstract

With the rapid growth of video traffic, interest in the coding of video data has increased. Two new techniques are presented to significantly improve video compression ratio, with marginal effect on reconstructed quality. In both these techniques, important data of a macroblock is compressed in one block, while rest of the three data blocks hold difference values in horizontal, vertical and diagonal direction. This results in reduced bitstream size because of low valued data in the three blocks, giving higher compression ratio. These algorithms have an additional advantage that they can be effectively used for error resilience applications with good error handling capacity. For error resilient applications, important data block in a macroblock is transmitted in a secure channel and the remaining three blocks with difference data are sent via lossy channel. In case of error in lossy channel, picture can still be reconstructed with a reasonably good quality using the block transmitted in secure channel that contains important data. Better reconstruction quality is obtained after compression, when used at low bitrates. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.