Low delay error resilience algorithm for H.265|HEVC video transmission

Transmission of high-resolution compressed video on unreliable transmission channels with time-varying characteristics such as wireless channels can adversely affect the decoded visual quality at the decoder side. This task becomes more challenging when the video codec computational complexity is an essential factor for low delay video transmission. High-efficiency video coding (H.265|HEVC) standard is the most recent video coding standard produced by ITU-T and ISO/IEC organisations. In this paper, a robust error resilience algorithm is proposed to reduce the impact of erroneous H.265|HEVC bitstream on the perceptual video quality at the decoder side. The proposed work takes into consideration the compatibility of the algorithm implementations with and without feedback channel update. The proposed work identifies and locates the frame's most sensitive areas to errors and encodes them in intra mode. The intra-refresh map is generated at the encoder by utilising a grey projection method. The conducted experimental work includes testing the codec performance with the proposed work in error-free and error-prone conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm works effectively at high packet loss rates. These results come at the cost of a slight increase in the encoding bit rate overhead and computational processing time compared with the default HEVC HM16 reference software.