Error-propagation prevention technique for real-time video transmission over ATM networks

Video sequences compressed by the current videocompression standards—such as MPEG-1/2 and H.261/H.263, which include motion compensation and variable-length coding—are very sensitive to channel disturbances. There exist many error-concealment techniques that can improve the video quality substantially. However, they generally do not prevent or terminate the error propagation. The forced intraupdate technique was proposed for H.245 recently. In this paper, we present an efficient temporal error-propagation prevention method that implements the forced intraupdate concept implicitly. Once an error is detected at the decoder, the starting address of the erroneous macroblocks is sent back to the encoder. The encoder marks the possible damaged area, and the encoding process continues as normal except that the motion estimation will probably not refer to the erroneous part. Thus, the impact of the cell loss is limited to the erroneous slice only, and the damage from the error propagation is greatly reduced. Simulation results of MPEG-2 coding over asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks show that the error concealment with feedback can effectively isolate the error and reduce the damage to give satisfactory performance even when the cell-loss rate is higher than 1%. With the delay analysis of ATM networks, we also show that in most cases, the encoder has adequate time to get the feedback information before processing the next Ior P-frames.