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Key-frame reference selection for error resilient video coding using low-delay hierarchical coding structure

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Abstract

Low-delay hierarchical coding structure (LD-HCS), as one of the most crucial components in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, substantially complicates the temporal reference relationship and achieves better compression ratios. There have been lots of research work on increasing the error resilience of HEVC coding. However, most of them neglect the characteristics of LD-HCS and cannot achieve the optimum trade-off between coding efficiency and error robustness. To this end, in this paper, a non-feedback reference picture selection algorithm is proposed to improve the error robustness of HEVC streaming under LD-HCS, by reducing temporal error propagation in case of packet loss. Specifically, the temporal relationship among different frames under LD-HCS is firstly analyzed, and then frames with the lowest temporal layer are considered as the potential key-frame which is capable of preventing error propagation. Secondly, the end-to-end distortions of using two different reference schemes for the potential key-frame are compared based on an overall distortion estimation model, and the reference scheme that has less total distortion is chosen ultimately. Moreover, the potential key-frame will be encoded entirely in intra-mode if the error propagation is severe. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the proposed reference picture selection method significantly reduces the effect of temporal error propagation. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed method is able to improve the video quality over error-prone networks.

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All 18 tested sequences are taken from HEVC standard video set [19].

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62001400), Sichuan Science and Technology Program (Grant No. 2021YJ0364), Foundation for Department of Transportation of Henan Province, China (2022-4-6), Grant of Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing (Grant No. HXO2020-118), Guangxi Science and Technology Program (Grant Nos. 2021AB07044, 2021AB07043 and 2021AB40145) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2021M702713). The Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing, China (Grant No. CSTB2023NSCQ-BHX0224).

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Author notes

  1. Bing Wang, Qiang Peng and Wei Li have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Xi’an Road, Chengdu, 611756, Sichuan, China

    Jiajun Xu, Qiang Peng & Wei Li

  2. School of Information Science and Engineering, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Xuefu Road, Chongqing, 40074, China

    Bing Wang

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  1. Jiajun Xu
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Contributions

JX was involved in conceptualization, methodology, software, writing and preparing the original draft and visualization; JX and BW had contributed to validation and formal analysis; BW, WL and QP carried out writing, reviewing, editing, supervision and project administration. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Wei Li.

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Xu, J., Wang, B., Peng, Q. et al. Key-frame reference selection for error resilient video coding using low-delay hierarchical coding structure. SIViP 18, 215–222 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02742-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02742-5

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