Alternate motion-compensated prediction for error resilient video coding

Since the quality of compressed video is vulnerable to errors, video transmission over unreliable Internet is very challenging today. Two-Hypothesis Motion-Compensated Prediction (THMCP) has been shown to have Error Resilience (ER) capability for video transmission, where each macroblock is predicted from its previous two frames. In this paper, we propose a novel ER approach named Alternate Motion-Compensated Prediction (AMCP). In addition to two-hypothesis prediction, one-hypothesis prediction is alternately used. We use some schemes to determine which kind of prediction should be used, so that in some cases of loss, the propagated error can be first decreased to some extent before it spreads to the subsequent frames. As a result, the expected converged error is less than that obtained from THMCP with fixed weights (THMCPF). Both analysis and simulation results are given to show that AMCP performs better than THMCPF, in terms of both compression efficiency and ER capability. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.