Hierarchical-P Reference Picture Selection Based Error Resilient Video Coding Framework for High Efficiency Video Coding Transmission Applications

In this paper, a new reference picture selection (RPS) is proposed for a high efficiency video coding (HEVC) framework. In recent studies, HEVC has been shown to be sensitive to packet error which is unavoidable in transmission applications especially for wireless networks. RPS is an effective error resilient technique for video transmission systems where a feedback channel with short round trip delay time is available. However, its procedure cannot directly apply to the HEVC framework and thus this paper expands it. In RPS, error propagation can still happen during round trip delay time. To alleviate the effect of error propagation for better quality, the proposed algorithm considers both the RPS technique and the region-based intra mode selection method by using some novel features of HEVC. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the hierarchical-P RPS algorithm in terms of PSNR and other metrics. The average PSNR improvement of the proposed algorithm over the reference algorithm under 10% packet error rate is 1.56 dB for 1080p sequences, 2.32 dB for 720p sequences and 1.01 dB for wide video graphics array (WVGA) sequences, respectively. The performance of proposed method is also tested for applications where feedback information is not available. The proposed method shows noticeable improvement for video sequences that contain low or moderate level of motions.