Video Intra Coding for Compression and Error Resilience: A Review

Intra-coding is the application of spatial prediction coding to video data either on a whole frame basis or on individual macroblocks. This paper outlines the growing sophistication in intra-coding within recent standard codecs, the topic which is primarily relevant to compression for data storage. It then specializes to intra-coding for error resilience and intra-refresh, the topic which is relevant to video streaming applications. Efficient intra coding is becoming important for real-time high-resolution video, due to the computational cost of inter-coding, as the paper will consider for recent codecs. The paper will compare error-resilience performance across a variety of schemes. There are choices, which the paper analyses, as to whether to protect: on a whole frame basis; by intra-coding selected macro-blocks; and whether to use an isolated region; a cyclic intra-refresh line; or randomized insertion of macroblocks. The paper contains over 100 references, including recent patents in this field.