Unequal Forced Intra-Refresh for Real-time Multicast Video

In motion-compensated video coding, the errors caused by packet loss not only impair the reconstruction quality of current frame, but also lead to error propagation to subsequent frames. Based on the error-propagation analysis in a group of pictures (GOP), we propose an unequal forced intra-refresh scheme to increase error resilience of multicast video. According to a GOP-level error-propagation model, the proposed scheme can distribute the unequal number of forced intra-mode MBs to different P-frames of a GOP. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate the error-propagation effect and achieve about 0.1~1.1 dB gains over the traditional average scheme in H.264/AVC