Content-based hybrid error concealment approach for packet video communication over the noisy channels

Abstract

Video compression makes the encoded video stream more vulnerable to the channel errors so that, the quality of the received video is exposed to severe degradation when the compressed video is transmitted over the error-prone environments. Therefore, it is necessary to apply error concealment (EC) techniques in the decoder to improve the quality of the received video. In this regard, an Adaptive Content-based EC Approach (ACBECA) is proposed in this paper, which exploits both the spatial and temporal correlations within the video sequences for the EC purpose. The proposed approach adaptively utilizes two EC techniques, including new spatial-temporal error concealment (STEC) technique, and a temporal error concealment (TEC) technique, to recover the lost regions of the frame. The STEC technique proposed in this paper is established on the basis of non-Local Means concept and tries to recover each lost macroblock (MB) as the weighted average of the similar MBs in the reference frame, whereas the TEC technique recovers the motion vector of the lost MB adaptively by analyzing the behavior of the MB in the frame. The decision on temporally or spatially reconstructing the degraded frames is made dynamically according to the content of the degraded frame (i.e., structure or texture), type of the error and also block loss rate (BLR). Compared with the state-of-the-art EC techniques, the simulation results indicate the superiority of the ACBECA in terms of both the objective and subjective quality assessments.