Packet prioritization for H.264/AVC video with cyclic intra-refresh line

•An intra-refresh line within a video frame acts as a form of error resilience.•The intra-refresh line’s position in each frame defines three H.264/AVC slices.•Two prioritization schemes are possible based on the slice’s position.•The improved packet-based scheme can achieve video quality gains of up to 4 dB.•Prioritization is demonstrated in a wireless home network.

Insertion of a cyclic intra-refresh line is a lightweight way of mitigating spatio-temporal error propagation in a video stream transmitted over a mobile network. This paper presents low-complexity yet effective prioritization based on slice position within a video frame relative to the cyclic refresh line. Two prioritization schemes are compared. The first is a region-based method, while the second, which is packet-based, improves packet classification. Experimental results indicate that, the packet-based scheme can achieve video quality gains of up to 4 dB, compared to when the scheme is not used. The proposed schemes require no decoder modifications and do not introduce an increase in bitrate or in computational complexity.