Motion energy estimation of group of pictures and its application for Unequal Error Protection of H.264/AVC video bitstreams

An Unequal Error Protection (UEP) technique for H.264/AVC video bitstreams constituted by GOP structure is proposed. It is formed by motion energy concept, which is defined as the energy necessary for displacement of macroblocks between two consecutive frames. The importance of GOPs is determined by their motion energies estimated by Lagrange polynomial. This estimation method expresses a function, which considers previous GOPs having a high correlation with each other. Then, video frames are unequally protected based on their motion activities and the importance of GOPs. Since previous GOPs are used for predicting the current one, no delay for transmission of video bitstreams is required. Simulation results show that with similar Forward Error Correcting (FEC) code rates applied for different protection levels, the proposed technique outperforms other GOP-based UEP techniques.