Error concealment considering error propagation inside a frame

Abstract

Transmission of compressed video over error prone channels may result in packet losses or errors, which can significantly degrade the image quality. Such degradation even becomes worse in 1Seg video broadcasting, which is widely used in Japan and Brazil for mobile phone TV service recently, where errors are drastically increased and lost areas are contiguous. Therefore the errors in earlier concealed MBs (macro blocks) may propagate to the MBs later to be concealed inside the same frame (spatial domain). The error concealment (EC) is used to recover the lost data by the redundancy in videos. Aiming at spatial error propagation (SEP) reduction, this paper proposes a SEP reduction based EC (SEPEC). In SEPEC, besides the mismatch distortion in current MB, the potential propagated mismatch distortion in the following to be concealed MBs is also minimized. Also, 2 extensions of SEPEC, that SEPEC with refined search and SEPEC with multiple layer match are discussed. Compared with previous work, the experiments show SEPEC achieves much better performance of video recovery and excellent trade-off between quality and computation in 1Seg broadcasting in terms of computation cost.