Pixel-level Matching Based Multi-hypothesis Error Concealment Modes for Wireless 3D H.264/MVC Communication

Abstract

3D multi-view video (MVV) is multiple video streams shot by several cameras around a single scene simultaneously. Therefore it is an urgent task to achieve high 3D MVV compression to meet future bandwidth constraints while maintaining a high reception quality. 3D MVV coded bit-streams that are transmitted over wireless network can suffer from error propagation in the space, time and view domains. Error concealment (EC) algorithms have the advantage of improving the received 3D video quality without any modifications in the transmission rate or in the encoder hardware or software. To improve the quality of reconstructed 3D MVV, we propose an efficient adaptive EC algorithm with multi-hypothesis modes to conceal the erroneous Macro-Blocks (MBs) of intra-coded and inter-coded frames by exploiting the spatial, temporal and inter-view correlations between frames and views. Our proposed algorithm adapts to 3D MVV motion features and to the error locations. The lost MBs are optimally recovered by utilizing motion and disparity matching between frames and views on pixel-by-pixel matching basis. Our simulation results show that the proposed adaptive multi-hypothesis EC algorithm can significantly improve the objective and subjective 3D MVV quality.