A FEC Allocation Method for Unequal Loss Protection of H.264/AVC Videos Based on Macroblock Index

A variety of multimedia applications are becoming available on wireless networks nowadays. However, packet loss when transiting videos over wireless networks is inevitable, and leads to error propagation in information of subsequent frames and a decline in picture quality. To solve the problems, this paper proposes an estimation method based on the H.264/AVC codecs smallest units of encoding and decoding to provide unequal loss protection and to allocate forward error correction (FEC) packets. We propose a Frame Macroblock Error Propagation Index (FMEPI) estimation method to determine the importance of frames. Moreover, the impact of overall video quality of an importance index according to the FMEPI to allocate different number of FEC packets. Our simulation results show that the FMEPI estimation method produces better video reconstruction quality when packet loss occurs.