A Temporal Approach for Improving Intra-Frame Concealment Performance in H.264/AVC

The highly error-prone nature of wireless environments and limited computational power of mobile devices necessitates the implementation of robust yet simple error concealment in H.264/AVC. In this paper, we propose to use data hiding to facilitate the error concealment on intra-coded frames that utilizes the temporal redundancy in a wireless video bitstream. At the encoder side, the motion vector of a macroblock (MB) is encoded and imperceptibly embedded into other MB within the same intra-frame. If an MB is found missing at the decoder, the embedded information will be retrieved from the corresponding MB for the recovery of the lost MB. In order to isolate erroneous MBs caused by packet loss, a block shuffling scheme is applied. It is shown that the proposed method is able to shift the computation burden from decoder to encoder, and reduce the computation complexity of conventional error concealment methods. In addition, due to the use of real motion vectors for temporal concealment, the proposed method provides improved picture quality over the reference methods in H.264/AVC.