Impact of Packet Loss on H.264 Scalable Video Coding

This paper presents an exact study of the impact of packet loss on the H.264 scalable video coding (SVC). A Markov Chain (MC) with 2N states is developed to describe the error propagation process inside a group of picture (GOP). The model is extended to estimate the number of frames affected by transmission errors for a video sequence composed of multiple GOPs. By analysing the inter-frame prediction rules, we examine the performance of different GOP structures against transmission errors. From the exact analysis, several metrics are analytically determined. Based on the proposed metrics, the performance of the SVC hierarchical B-frame structure and the advance video coding (AVC) IPPP structure (compatible base layer in SVC) are evaluated and compared under the assumption of random packet loss with rate p.