Robust Error Handling for Video Streaming over Mobile Networks

The quality of video streaming in an error-prone environment suffers from packet loss. Since the loss of a packet typically affects a rather large picture area, the performance of error concealment is limited, too. In order to avoid the huge overhead caused by using smaller packet sizes, in this paper we propose and analyze a scheme utilizing the residual redundancy of the encoded video stream. This scheme has two components -(i) syntax analysis implemented at the decoder, allowing exacter localization of errors within the packet and (ii) entropy code resynchronization mechanism based on the out-of-band signalized length indicators. We show that the proposed approach provides substantial improvement in PSNR for the same rate, compared to the standard packet size reduction.