Joint explicit FMO, FEC coding, and adaptive interleaving depth for H.264 wireless video transmission

Flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) is an error resilience tools in H.264 that can be used to mitigate errors in video transmission and is shown to be effective in the previous research findings. In this paper, the effectiveness of integrating explicit map using bit-count FMO, i.e., a macroblock level interleaving, with Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding and interleaving, i.e., bit-level interleaving, has been investigated. To cope with burst errors in various fading conditions, we proposed to adaptively adjust interleaving depth based on the mean burst length statistics obtained the previous frames. Based on the channel condition prediction, FMO is only used when the channel condition is good. Alternatively FMO with FEC and adaptive interleaving depth is used when the channel condition is bad. The simulation results under slow and fast fading wireless channel scenarios show that our proposed scheme help reduce the number of undecodable macroblock of up to 88% and achieve the PSNR improvement of up to 7.5 dB, compared to not using error mitigation scheme. Thus, the proposed framework could be adopted as error mitigation scheme for wireless video transmission.