Multi-Stage Frame Error Concealment Algorithm for H.264/AVC Based on Estimated MB Feature

This paper proposes a novel multi-stage frame error concealment (EC) algorithm for H.264/AVC based on estimated MB modes and MVs. The proposed method first divides the lost frame into three regions according to MB features in previous frame: which are regular motion region within the object and background, irregular motion region mainly including border areas between various parts of moving object and background, and intra-coded MB region. Then we recover the three regions sequentially by utilizing suitable schemes, motion vector copy method for regular motion region, improved optical flow based method for irregular motion region, and bilinear interpolation (BI) or directional interpolation (DI) method for intra-coded MB region. Experimental results show that our proposed adaptive algorithm can effectively utilize the advantages of classic methods and obtain better recovery performance both in subjective and objective video quality at low computational complexity, and our method effectively prevents the error propagation in the following frames and thus improves the reconstruction quality of the entire video sequence.