Temporal Error Concealment for MPEG-Coded Video over Error-Prone Networks

Abstract

Compressed video streams that transmitted over error prone networks may suffer severe degradation. Error concealment (EC) is one practical approach to combat with the error propagation. A number of EC techniques have been developed to diminish the influence of transmission errors. However, the techniques are always inefficient when the motions of object in a video are fast or complex. This paper proposes an adaptive temporal EC algorithm to precisely conceal the errors for MPEG-coded video. In the proposed method, each damaged macroblock is first divided into four equal sized sub-blocks. Both of the undamaged motion vectors and gray intensity information surrounding a damaged macroblock are performed to reconstruct the lost motion vectors of the sub-blocks based on boundary matching technique. Then the estimated motion vectors are utilized to reconstruct the damaged macroblock by exploiting the information from reference frames. Experimental results show that the visual quality and the PSNR evaluation of reconstructed frames are significantly improved by using the proposed EC algorithms. Thus the proposed method is expected to be a useful EC algorithm for motion vector compressed video over an error-prone network.