An error resilience technique based on FMO and error propagation for H.264 video coding in error-prone channels

Flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) is one of the new error resilience techniques in H.264 that can be used to mitigate the effects of error in error prone environments. Using FMO, each macroblock can be assigned independently to a certain slice group by using a macroblock allocation map(MBAmap). FMO tool depends on how the macroblocks are ordered, and various methods of reducing the error during MBAmap creation have been proposed. However, these methods usually focused on how to reduce the effects of error macroblocks within a frame while the issue of error propagation between frames has not been considered. This study concentrates on estimating the effects caused by the damaged macroblocks of the current frame to the next frame and the other macroblocks in the same slice group. These effects can be used in the evaluation of the macroblocks´ importance in the current frame, and a suitable map with a reduced effect of error propagation can be generated. Results show that this method has improvements in PSNR and the number of undecodable macroblocks when compared to the other methods that did not take the effects of inter-frame error propagation into consideration.