H.264 video communication based refined error concealment schemes

Error resilience is an essential problem for video communications, such as digital TV broadcasting, mobile video terminals and video telephone. The latest video compression standard H.264/AVC provides more coding efficiency for a wide range of video consumer applications. Yet H.264 video streams are still vulnerable to transmission errors. In this paper, a set of error concealment techniques are proposed to provide error resilience based on new coding and network characteristics of H.264. The temporal concealment involves a method of subblock-based refined motion compensated concealment using weighting boundary match, which improves the ability to deal with high motion activity areas. The spatial concealment scheme involves an algorithm of refined directional weighted spatial interpolation, which could protect object edge integrity. Combining the above algorithms, an adaptive spatial/temporal estimation method with low complexity is presented. Transmission over typical 3GPP/3GPP2 mobile IP channels is simulated with a wide range of bit rate and BER. The refined concealment techniques provide more error robustness for video consumer electronics than those suggested in H.264 without any encoder-side modifications.