Error resilience of multireference motion compensated prediction in video coding

Standard coded video is vulnerable to transmission errors when transmitted over unreliable channels. The authors propose using multireference motion compensated prediction (MCP) to provide resilience to transmission errors. Both the concealment error and propagation error can be reduced in multireference MCR. First, using the multiple motion vectors associated with each coded block, a concealment scheme of low complexity with small concealment error is proposed. Then the theoretical performance limit of propagation error and coding efficiency in multireference MCP is analysed. Through a numerical solution based on the theoretical performance limit, it is found that a multireference MCP scheme can achieve greater propagation error attenuation than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. The numerical solution also demonstrates that the performance of the multireference MCP average scheme approaches the theoretical performance limit, with coding efficiency higher than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. Finally, results of a simulation under the assumed packet loss environment typical of the Internet are given. Simulation results demonstrate that video coding with multireference MCP performs much better than the conventional H.263 coding scheme in a lossy environment.