Spatial error concealment for H.264 using sequential directional interpolation

Abstract

Error concealment at the decoder restores erroneous macroblocks (MBs) caused by channel errors. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial error concealment algorithm based on prediction modes of intra-blocks which are included in a H.264-coded stream and highly correlated to the direction of local edge within the block. The key contribution is to sequentially interpolate each pixel in a lost MB by utilizing edge directions and strengths efficiently estimated from the neighboring blocks, preserving local edge continuity for more visually acceptable images. The proposed scheme is simple to implement and more reliably recover high-detailed content in corrupted MBs. The experimental results shows the proposed method achieves reduction in speed by 14% <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 39% as compared to existing method, and outperforms them in PSNR by 0.5 <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">~</sub> 1 dB as well as in subjective visual evaluation.