Dynamic motion vector refreshing for enhanced error resilience in HEVC

The high level of compression efficiency achieved by HEVC coding techniques decreases the error resilience performance under error prone conditions. This paper addresses the error resiliency of the HEVC standard, focusing on the new motion estimation tools. It is shown that the temporal dependency of motion information is comparatively higher than that in the H.264/AVC standard, causing an increase in the error propagation. Based on this evidence, this paper proposes a method to make intelligent use of temporal motion vector (MV) candidates during the motion estimation process, in order to decrease the temporal dependency, and improve the error resiliency without penalising the rate-distortion performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method improves the error resilience under tested conditions by increasing the video quality by up to 1.7 dB in average, compared to the reference method that always enables temporal MV candidates.