Practical error concealment strategy for video streaming adopting scalable video coding

The scalable video coding (SVC) standard adopts four post-processing error concealment (EC) methods as a non-normative tool in order to conceal a lost picture in transmission. In this paper, we first introduce an error tracking model with which the concealment error and propagation error can be estimated. Then, we analyze the four EC methods using the error tracking model. Until now, there have been few studies on how to conceal SVC bitstream corrupted by burst errors. Based on the results of the error analysis, we propose a selection-based EC strategy to conceal burst errors for SVC bitstream. In the proposed strategy, one of the four EC methods is adaptively selected such that the visual degradation is minimized for each lost picture. The experimental results show that the proposed EC strategy can improve the EC performance without increasing the computational complexity. Moreover, the proposed strategy does not require any modification of the conventional SVC codec since it utilizes only the EC methods adopted in the standard.