Techniques for improving the error resilience of MPEG-5 codecs

This paper is concerned with the performance of MPEG-2 compressed video when transmitted over noisy channels, a subject of relevance to digital terrestrial television. We present the results of introducing errors into MPEG-2 video, and propose techniques for substantially improving the resilience of MPEG-2 to transmission errors without the addition of any extra redundancy into the bitstream. We find that it is errors in variable length data which cause the greatest artefacts as errors in these data can cause loss of bitstream synchronisation. We achieve resynchronisation using a technique known as error-resilient entropy coding (EREC). Finally we improve the error-resilience of differential coded information by replacing the standard 1D-DPCM with a more resilient hierarchical pyramid predictor