Adaptive block-based error concealment scheme in spatial enhancement layer on H.264/AVC SVC

H.264/AVC scalable video coding (H.264/AVC SVC) offers the flexible adaptivity in terms of spatial, temporal and SNR scalabilities for the generated bitstream. However, transmission of such compressed video over error prone channels may result in packet losses or errors, which can significantly degrade the image quality. In this paper, we present a new error concealment (EC) scheme to tackle the slice lose problem in spatial enhancement layer based on H.264/AVC SVC. In the proposed scheme, the lost macroblock is concealed by base layer skip (BLSkip) method, or by temporal error concealment in enhancement layer (ELTEC) using external boundary matching algorithm (EBMA). Utilizing base layer MB mode, local motion similarity degree (LMSD) and blocking artifact information, the aforementioned two methods are switched adaptively. Simulation results show that the proposed methods improves the subjective video quality and obtains a gain of about 0.23B~0.44dB in PSNR, compared with BLSkip in Joint Scalable Video Model (JSVM) in the condition of equal packet loss rate.