Performance evaluation of motion concealment in HEVC over a Rayleigh fading channel

High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest standard in the video transmission sector, and is designed to improve the compression rate and efficiency of video streaming applications. However, one of the many design constraints to improve HEVC is the reliability of transmission. HEVC introduces a sever output degradation when error propagation occurs because of its high compression rate. In this paper, the performance of HEVC is evaluated by video streaming over a Rayleigh distributed environment. The transmission over Rayleigh distributed environment will generate lost and dropped packets because of attenuation in the reception power and limited capacity of the network. The packet loss is then analyzed such that it obeys the statistical envelope of the propagation model used. The wireless simulation generates error patterns which depicts which frame and slice IDs in the video sequence have experienced a packet loss, which will be used as reference by the modified HEVC decoder for motion concealment. The results measured from the decoded video quality are calculated using the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) which is compared to the percent error rate. These results were obtained by setting bit rates of 32 kbps and 128 kbps for three video sequences with different motion levels, as well as setting the bytes per slice to 16. In a wireless network with a Rayleigh distributed channel, increasing the bit rate and motion level of the video sequence will decrease the overall PSNR.