Abstract
This paper presents unequal error protection and error concealment techniques far robust H.263 video transmission over mobile channels. The proposed error protection scheme has three major features. First, it has the capability of preventing the loss of synchronization information in H.263 video stream as much as possible that the H.263 decoder can resynchronize at the next decoding point, if errors are occurred. Secondly, it employs an unequal error protection scheme to support variable coding rates using rate compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes, dividing the encoded stream into two classes. Finally, a macroblock-interleaving scheme is employed in order to minimize the corruption of consecutive macroblocks due to burst errors, which can make a proper condition for error concealment. In addition, to minimize the spatial error propagations due to the variable length codes, a fast resynchronization scheme at the group of block layer is developed for recovering subsequent error-free macroblocks following the damaged macroblock. futhermore, error concealment techniques based on both side match criterion and overlapped block motion compensation (OBMC) are employed at the source decoder so that it can not only recover the lost macroblock more accurately, but also reduce blocking artifacts. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can be an effective error protection scheme since proper video quality can be maintained under various channel bit error rates.