Error Resilient Video Coding Techniques Using Spare Pictures

In error prone environments not all the picture data can be received correctly during video transmission. Error propagation introduced by employing predictive coding may degrade the sequence quality severely. A novel method, called spare pictures, is proposed to indicate the similarity between a reference picture and other pictures. With the help of the signaled spare pictures information, receivers may avoid unnecessary picture freezing, feedback and complex error concealment, which are normally done as a response to missing picture data. Furthermore, spare pictures may also help 1) to improve the quality of some decoded pictures by replacing the reference pictures by better ones, and 2) to improve error concealment by concealing a lost block as a corresponding block in one of the spare pictures. An efficient coding method for the spare macroblock maps is also proposed. The mechanism for signaling the spare pictures was adopted to H.263 version 3 and ITU-T H.264 | MPEG-4 AVC as Supplemental Enhancement Information [1], [2].