An Unequal Error Protection in ROI for H.264

Compressed video sequences are very vulnerable to channel disturbances especially when they are transmitted over the packet erasure channels. The transmission errors 1 caused by packet loss not only corrupt the current decoded frame, but also cause the error propagation to the succeeding frames which degrades the quality of services. Therefore, it is considerably important to develop the error resilience techniques to minimize the visual degradation caused by the packet erasure problem. In this paper, we present a ROI (region of interest) protection strategy which aims to reduce the visual distortion caused by packet loss and also obtain a better balance between the transmission overlay and the perceptual benefits. In our method, FEC protection is applied to the ROI in a chessboard-distributed manner and transmitted through the RTP/RTCP Protocols over UDP/IP. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has satisfactory subjective and objective video quality in the burst packet-loss environments.