Decoding H.264/AVC using prior information and source constraints

Abstract

The H.264/AVC standard employs a number of errorresilient mechanisms to correct transmission errors. These methods assume a packet-loss scenario, where all the macroblocks (MBs) contained within a corrupted slice are dropped and concealed. However, most of the MBs contained within corrupted slices provide minimal (if any) visual distortions and therefore concealing them causes a superfluous drop in the quality of the recovered video content. This paper presents a novel error control mechanism which employs prior information and residual source-redundancy to recover the most-likelihood feasible H.264/AVC bitstream. Simulation results show that the algorithm recovers a number of corrupted sequences and achieves overall Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) gains between 1dB and 2dB over the standard. The proposed solution is compatible with the H.264/AVC with no additional bandwidth requirements.