Slice header reconstruction for H.264/AVC robust decoders

For H.264/AVC encoded video sequences, a transmission error in the bit-stream can affect either the underlying codeword or even the subsequent symbols, thus resulting in a great degradation of the received images. In this paper we present a powerful algorithm of slice-header reconstruction for H.264/AVC decoders: after having decoded the corrupted header of a slice, it can recover most of the related slice data without requiring any interaction from the encoder side. Our method exploits the redundancy available when slice partitioning is applied, that is, the repetition of the most important header parameters in every slice of a picture. The proposed approach allows to recover high quality pictures from the corresponding corrupted slices for a wide range of bit error rates (BER)