In favor of fully intra coding for HEVC video transmission over lossy channels

Abstract

Packet loss is inevitable when the video is transmitted over lossy channels. HEVC, due to the relatively large coding unit and high compression ratio, is much sensitive to data loss. Against the data loss, the responses of inter or intra coded blocks/frames are not the same. In the case of intra coding, the inter-frame dependency is removed and hence the error propagation is mitigated. However, with intra coding, since there is no motion vector, error concealment is more challenging than inter coding. Another difference between inter and intra coding is compression ratio where it is usually much better when using inter prediction. In this paper, taking into account the above trade-offs, a series of experiments is conducted to show the domain of preference of intra or inter coding in the application of HEVC video transmission over packet lossy networks. It is achieved that, if ratio of bitrates of I-Frames and P-Frames is smaller than a threshold, fully intra coding provides higher PSNR than some complicated methods; the improvement is as much as 2.5 dB sometimes. The performance of the proposed method is not the best as experimental results show, but besides its acceptable Rate-Quality behavior, it provides some side advantages. © 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.