Error tolerance schemes for H.264/AVC: An evaluation

Video transmission is sensitive to losses due to high compression efficiency. To tolerate the quality degradation from losses, Forward Error Correction (FEC) and error resilience schemes are commonly used. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of error tolerance schemes with the latest video coding standard, H.264/AVC. The analysis in three zones of packet loss rates (PLR) shows that no FEC scheme outperforms the others in a wide PLR range. We also compare the equal and unequal FEC schemes with the Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) error resilience mechanism and find that FMO performs well in moving videos while FEC codes are better in rather static videos. Our results and analysis would give insights to design flexible applications which are able to adapt to the network dynamics.