Error resilient coding of H.264 using intact long-term reference frames

Transmission of compressed video over packet lossy networks is a challenge task due to the well-known error propagation problem, which may substantially degrade the transmitted video quality. In this paper, we propose an error-resilient coding scheme for the newest coding standard H.264 by using intact long-term reference frames. Specifically, two reference frames are available for inter-coding, one is the immediate past frame marked as short-term reference frame, and the other is an older and error-free one marked as long-term reference frame. To mitigate error propagation, a number of macroblocks (MBs) in each inter-frame are selected to be predicted from the long-term reference frame. Compared to the widely used MB intra-refresh, the proposed scheme is equally robust but more coding efficient. Numerical simulation results verify the validity of our scheme.