Error Resilient Video Coding with Tree Structure Motion Compensation and Data Partitioning

This paper introduces a new scheme for robust video coding and transmission to reduce the effect of error propagation. In this scheme, the linear structure of motion estimation and compensation in the H.263/H.26L is rearranged to a tree structure. With this structure, the length of error propagation in most of the frames is confined to a specified number and the Macro-Block (MB) intra-refreshing rate is implicitly increased. Since different frames in this structure are of different importance in terms of error propagation, frames are sorted to different priorities according to their importance in confining the error propagation. This property is used to design a new data prioritization scheme, in which different levels of error protection are assigned to packets from different types of frames. Furthermore, it is found that the proposed scheme is complimentary with data partitioning. Thus, a combination of data partitioning with the proposed scheme is also proposed in this paper.