Error Concealment Using a Halftone Watermarking Technique

In this paper, we propose an error concealment technique for H.264 coded videos. The algorithm is targeted at compressed videos degraded after packet losses caused by transmission over an unreliable channel. We use a combination of watermarking and half toning (dithering) techniques. At the encoder side, a dithered version of each video frame is embedded into the video using a watermarking technique. The watermarking technique used by the proposed algorithm is a modified version of the Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) algorithm, which provides a good data hiding capacity. At the decoder side, the algorithm identifies which packets of the video were lost, extracts the corresponding mark, and applies an inverse half toning technique to estimate the original content. The algorithm is fast and has a good performance, being able to restore content with a better quality than the default H.264 error concealment algorithm.