Flexible macroblock ordering based on region of interest for H.264/AVC wireless video transmission

H.264/AVC is the latest video coding standard jointly developed by ITU-T and ISO/IEC, one feature of H.264/AVC is a robust error resilience tool at the encoder known as Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO). In this paper, we present a method to generate explicit FMO maps based on the concept of region of interest (ROI). Using ROI is similar to the concept of foreground and background objects in images, and consequently we utilize spatial and temporal information for explicit FMO map generation for foreground and background respectively. The proposed method uses number of coded bits of a macroblock (MB), considered as spatial information, and a distortion measure from concealment error considered as temporal information as indicators of macroblock importance. A one-pass encoding scheme is used by making use of feedback information from the encoder derived from the previous frame. Simulation results under the scenarios of slow and fast fading channel shows that the proposed method can reduce the number of undecodable macroblocks can and improve the PSNR of the decoded video.