Effective Error Concealment Using Kalman Filter for Heavily Corrupted Videos in H.264/AVC

Error concealment at the decoder side is an economical approach to ensuring an acceptable and stable video quality in case of packet erasure or loss, and thus attracts lots of interest. Current techniques mainly employ the spatial or temporal correlation to predict the motion vectors of the missing blocks, and interpolation, extrapolation or boundary matching schemes are usually effective. However, for heavily corrupted sequences, e.g., with macroblock loss rate beyond 50%, most methods might perform less satisfactorily. Inspired by the tracking efficiency of Kalman filter, in the present work, we adopted it to predict the missing MVs, and the unpredicted ones (minority) were recovered complementarily by using the bilinear motion field interpolation (MFI) method. The experimental results on typical sequences reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the boundary matching algorithm and the MFI technique by up to about 4.77 dB and 3.66 dB respectively for heavily corrupted videos.