Error-Resilient Region-of-Interest Video Coding

An error resilient video coding method is proposed. It yields less degradation, caused by data loss, in areas of the frame which are of greater interest compared to the rest of the frame. This is achieved by employing a nonlinear transform that duplicates macroblocks inside the region of interest (ROI). This increased redundancy for ROI yields a high quality reconstruction of ROI even with missing data. Simulations show that this approach has acceptable performance. Moreover, the method proposed can be implemented through pre- and post-processing of the video sequence, without modification to the source codecs (e.g., H.263, MPEG4, H.264).