Error concealment techniques for H.263 video transmission

Error resilient video transmission over such unreliable channels as wireless and Internet has became an important research issue especially with the increasing interests in mobile multimedia communication over the next generation wideband networks. Error detection and concealment techniques, which are applicable to such block-based motion estimation video coders as H.263 and MPEG, are proposed. An error concealment scheme by post-processing to hide visual artifacts and residual errors is utilized at the decoder. Those techniques recovering the damaged areas based on characteristics of image and video signals are implemented using both spatial interpolation and temporal motion estimation. Based on the international standard H.263, experimental results including video transmission characteristics over noisy channels are presented for a bit rate of 9.6kbps and QCIF resolution. It is shown that the proposed error concealment technique by post-processing enhances the decoder performance in terms of the reconstructed image quality represented by PSNR and doesn't require sacrifice of system overhead.