A new motion-compensated error concealment scheme for MPEG-4 video transmission

For entropy-coded MPEG-4 video object planes (VOPs), a transmission error in a codeword will not only affect the underlying codeword but may also affect subsequent codewords, resulting in a great degradation of the received VOPs. In this study, after an error detection scheme is employed to detect all the corrupted MPEG-4 VOPs and macroblocks (MBs). A modified version of the spatial error concealment scheme (Kang and Leou, 2005) is employed to conceal corrupted IVOPs and the proposed motion-compensated error concealment scheme is used to conceal corrupted PVOPs. Here, a new fitness function for error concealment is proposed and a predicted motion vector (PMV) for each corrupted MB is first determined by the spatially neighboring MVs around the corrupted MB and the temporally motion-projected overlapping MBs in the previous VOP. With the PMV being the central point, three rood search patterns are developed for motion-compensated error concealment of small-, medium-, and large-motion corrupted MBs. Finally, error concealment refinement using Lagrange interpolation is performed on all the initially concealed MBs so that the final error concealment results can be improved.