A cell-loss concealment technique for MPEG-2 coded video

Abstract

Audio-visual and other multimedia services are seen as important sources of traffic for future telecommunication networks, including wireless networks. A major drawback with some wireless networks is that they introduce a significant number of transmission errors into the digital bitstream. For video, such errors can have the effect of degrading the quality of service to the point where it is unusable. We introduce a technique that allows for the concealment of the impact of these errors. Our work is based on MPEG-2 encoded video transmitted over a wireless network whose data structures are similar to those of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. Our simulations include the impact of the MPEG-2 systems layer and cover cell-loss rates up to 5%. This is substantially higher than those that have been discussed in the literature up to this time. We demonstrate that our new approach can significantly increase received video quality, but at the cost of a considerable computational overhead. We then extend our technique to allow for higher computational efficiency and demonstrate that a significant quality improvement is still possible.