Robust transmission of video sequence using double-vector motion compensation

This paper proposes a motion compensation (MC) algorithm for robust transmission of video sequence, called the double-vector motion compensation (DMC). In the DMC, each block B in a frame is predicted from the weighted superposition of two blocks in the previous two frames, using two motion vectors. Therefore, when one of these two blocks is corrupted during the transmission, the decoder can efficiently suppress its error propagation to the subsequent frames, by predicting B only from the other block. It is shown by analysis that the DMC algorithm yields significantly lower error bounds for the subsequent frames than the conventional MC technique. Furthermore, the DMC algorithm can be combined with an effective concealment algorithm, which is capable of recovering very severe transmission errors, such as loss of an entire frame. A complete video coder, based on the DMC, is implemented by modifying the MC syntax of the H.263 standard and tested intensively in a realistic error prone environment. It is shown that the proposed algorithm provides much better objective and subjective performances than the H.263 coder in the error-prone environment.