Optimal intra coding of blocks for robust video communication over the Internet

Reliable transmission of compressed video in a packet lossy environment cannot be achieved without error recovery mechanisms. We describe an effective method for increasing error resilience of video transmission over packet lossy networks such as the Internet. Intra coding (without reference to a previous picture) is a well-known technique for eliminating temporal error propagation in a predictive video coding system. Randomly intra coding of blocks increases error resilience to packet loss. However, when the error concealment used by the decoder is known, intra encoding following a method that optimizes the tradeoffs between compression efficiency and error resilience is a better alternative. In this paper, we present a rate-distortion optimized mode selection method for packet lossy environments that takes into account the network conditions and the error concealment method used at the decoder. We present results for different packet loss rates and typical packet sizes of the Internet, that illustrate the advantages of the proposed method. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.