An FMO based error resilience method in H.264/AVC and its UEP application in DVB-H link layer

Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) is one of the new error resilience tools introduced in H264/AVC. Several slice grouping methods have been studied for improving error robustness using FMO. In this paper, a simple and fast slice grouping method for inter frames is introduced. Fast mode decision and early Skip Mode decision are applied for the first encoding pass, and only the features that are available at the stage of early Skip Mode decision are used for the classification. The computation time cost can be reduced by about 50% on average compared to traditional methods. The proposed scheme is tested under the proposed Unequal Error Protection scheme at the DVB-H link layer. The results are compared to the standard MPE-FEC EEP scheme using traditional FMO type `interleaved' at the DVB-H link layer. It is shown that the proposed scheme can provide improved error robustness for high error rate channels in a DVB-H system.