Unequal error protection with the H.264 flexible macroblock ordering

In this paper the flexible macroblock ordering (FMO or arbitrary slice ordering) feature of the H.264/AVC codec has been used to improve the robustness of the transmitted video through unreliable channels. FMO improves the decoded video quality remarkably in the presence of an appropriate error concealment algorithm. There are a number of mapping structures to distribute the macroblocks in individual slice groups. In this paper, we propose a new mapping scheme that provides an opportunity for transmission layers to protect the macroblocks that are more important. This will introduce a new unequal error protection (UEP) scheme based on FMO. Our simulation results show that this UEP scheme is efficient and successful, especially at high bit error rates.