Error Resilient Video Coding Techniques Using Spare Pictures

ABSTRACT In error prone environments not all the picture data can be received correctly during video transmission. Error propagation introduced by employing predictive coding may degrade the sequence quality severely.A novel method, called spare pictures, is proposed to indicate the similarity between a reference picture andother pictures. With the help of thesignaled spare pictures information, receivers may avoid unnecessary picture freezing, feedback andcomplex error concealment, which are normally done as a response to missing picture data. Furthermore, spare pictures may also help 1) to improve the quality of some decoded pictures by replacing the reference picturesby better ones, and 2) to improve error concealment by concealing a lost block as a corresponding block in one of the spare pictures.An efficient coding method for the spare macroblock maps is also proposed. The mechanismfor signaling the spare pictureswas adopted toH.263 ve rsion 3 andITU -T H.264 | MPEG-4 AVC as Supplemental Enhancement Information [1], [2].