Joint Flexible Macroblock Ordering and FEC coding for H.264 wireless video transmission

Flexible Macroblock Ordering is the macroblocklevel error resilience tool defined in H.264 video coding standard for wireless video transmission. Nevertheless the issue of how to suitably arrange the macroblock in suitable mapping is yet to clarified and investigated. This paper addresses this issue and proposes the use of the encoder's macroblock coded-bit-count information as an indicator for a choice of macroblock-address-map of each picture. This proposed mapping is jointly used with forward error correction (FEC) coding. Simulation results under the scenarios of slow and fast fading channels verify the proposed technique help reduce the number of undecodable macroblocks of up to 86%. The works would improve the effectiveness of wireless video transmission.