Dynamic temporal error concealment for video data in error-prone environments

Abstract

Error concealment is a useful method for improving the damaged video quality in the decoder side. In this paper, a dynamic method with low computational complexity is presented to improve the visual quality of videos when up to 50% of the frames are damaged. In the proposed method, temporal replacement and the improved outer boundary matching algorithm are used for dynamical error concealment in inter-frames of videos. With the use of motion vectors (MVs) which are close to the damaged macroblock (MB) the method can determine whether the motion in specific areas is either regular, irregular, or zero. Then, based on this knowledge, different methods are performed. It adaptively selects a set of candidate MVs and external boundaries for comparison purposes. Furthermore, to increase the accuracy, depending on the correctness of adjacent MVs, a specific weight is given to the boundaries of adjacent MBs. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances both objective and subjective quality of damaged frames without any considerable increase in complexity. The average PSNR in some frames of test sequences has increased about 1.01 dB more than the outer boundary matching algorithm.