A Novel Error Concealment Algorithm for H.264/AVC

Abstract

To benefit network transmission, the bit stream of the whole frame coded by H.264/AVC is usually grouped into one packet. However, the packet loss during transmission will lead to the distortion of the reconstructed video and the error propagation. To deal with this problem, error concealment (EC) strategy is widely used to recover the lost frames and to weaken the effect of error propagation. In this paper, we propose a new EC method which uses both the forward and backward motion information to recover the motion information of the current lost frame. Besides, for the pixels whose motion information is quite different compared with its neighboring pixels, we propose to use the spatial correlation to fill up the pixels by minimizing the total variation (TV) norm. With the help of our proposed algorithm, we can obtain the motion vectors of the lost frames and improve the accuracy of motion vectors derived by the unidirection recovery method. Besides, the optimization strategy, minimizing the TV-norm for the pixels with quite different motion vectors, can help the decoder to recover the reconstructed frames more accurately. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve both better objective performance and subjective performance compared to well-known schemes.