Error concealment based on robust optical flow

During transmission of encoded digital video sequences over noisy communication channels, the information of the images is altered or lost. A new error concealment method based on robust optical flow is proposed, as a post-processing tool at the decoder side to solve this problem. The conventional error concealment methods often result in blocking artifacts because of inaccurate motion vector estimation. We use the attractive property of optical flow technique on motion estimation to recover the lost block in a pixel-wise manner. In order to increase the robustness, the Lorentzian function is used to construct the energy function. Simulation results show that the proposed method can recover the higher quality image on both subjective visual evaluation and objective numerical metrics, compared to the existing error concealment methods.