H.264/AVC video error concealment algorithm by employing motion vector recovery under cloud computing environment

Abstract

Network-based cloud computing has rapidly expanded as an effective way of video processing and transmission. Since packet losses or errors may frequently occur in cloud computing environment during the transmission of compressed video, error concealment is applied in the decoder to prevent significant degradation of image quality. Motion vector (MV) recovery is a widely-used temporal error concealment which shows satisfactory performance in practical application of video transmission. In this paper, a fast and effective temporal error concealment algorithm for H.264/AVC is presented, which efficiently utilizes the MVs of neighboring macroblocks (MB) which are adjacent to the lost MB under different circumstances. To ensure the precision of the MV recovery, a smallest division of $$4\times 4$$ 4 × 4 sub-block is applied, which will not bring too much complexity in the proposed algorithm. Each MV of sub-block is restored in individual method, and the recovery information is gathered from the nearby 20 sub-blocks. Simulation results under the virtual cloud environment show that our scheme can highly improve the quality of reconstructed video and obtain a gain of about 4 dB in PSNR, compared with other temporal error concealment methods in the condition of different packet loss rates and quantization parameters. The practical simplicity ensures that the proposed method can be readily applied to real-time video applications running under cloud computing environment.