The SP- and SI-frames design for H.264/AVC

This paper discusses two new frame types, SP-frames and SI-frames, defined in the emerging video coding standard, known as ITU-T Rec. H.264 or ISO/IEC MPEG-4/Part 10-AVC. The main feature of SP-frames is that identical SP-frames can be reconstructed even when different reference frames are used for their prediction. This property allows them to replace Iframes in applications such as splicing, random access, and error recovery/resilience. We also include a description of SIframes, which are used in conjunction with SP-frames. Finally, simulation results illustrating the coding efficiency of SPframes are provided. It is shown that SP-frames have significantly better coding efficiency than I-frames while providing similar functionalities.