Robust decoding for reduced error propagation of DC/AC prediction errors

This paper investigates the problem of error propagation in MPEG-4 video decoding when the DCT coefficients have been damaged. The problem is unique since the Intra DC/AC prediction tool adopted by the standard allows for coefficients to be predicted from both the horizontal and vertical directions. Although the standard offers a variety of error resilience techniques to prevent such errors from propagating, they are encoder dependent and one cannot guarantee that suitable encoding parameters have been chosen. Therefore, we propose a robust decoding method that reduces the propagation of such errors.