Shape Error Concealment Based on a Shape-Preserving Boundary Approximation

In object-based video representation, video scenes are composed of several arbitrarily shaped video objects (VOs), defined by their texture, shape and motion. In error-prone communications, packet loss results in missing information at the decoder. The impact of transmission errors is minimized through error concealment. In this paper, we propose a spatial error concealment technique for recovering lost shape data. We consider a geometric shape representation consisting of the object boundary, which can be extracted from the α-plane. Missing macroblocks result in a broken boundary. A B-spline curve is constructed to replace a missing boundary segment, based on a T-spline representation of the received boundary. We use T-splines because they produce shape-preserving approximations and do not change the characteristics of the original boundary. The representation ensures a good estimation of the first derivatives at the points touching the missing segment. Applying smoothing conditions, we manage to construct a new spline that joins smoothly with the received boundary, leading to successful concealment results. Experimental results on object shapes with different concealment difficulty demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Comparisons with prior proposed methods are also presented.