Multiframe block motion compensated video coding for wireless channels

The development of robust and efficient video coders for high error rate mobile channels is a problem of current significance. Many of the recently proposed approaches make use of the block motion compensation (BMC) approach for compression. In this paper we propose a multiframe extension to BMC coding. The multiframe BMC (MF-BMC) coder makes use of the redundancy that exists across multiple frames in typical video-conferencing sequences to achieve additional compression over that obtained by using the single frame BMC (SF-BMC) approach, such as the base level H.263 codec. The advantage of the MF-BMC approach is that it is more robust to error propagation when compared to the traditional SF-BMC, as it makes use of information from multiple frames. The MF-BMC coder proposed in this paper is a multiframe extension of the base level H.263 coder and is found to be more robust than the base level H.263 coder when subjected to simulated errors commonly encountered on wireless channels.