Optimization of Hybridized Error Concealment for H.264

Transmission of highly compressed video bitstreams can result in packet erasures when channel status is unfavorable, the consequence being not only the corruption of a single frame, but propagation to its successors. In order to avoid error-catalyzed artifacts from producing visible corruption of affected video frames, the use of error concealment at the video decoder becomes essential. The purpose of this paper proposes an efficient and integrated novel EC method for the latest video compression standard H.264/AVC, using not only spatially and temporally correlated information but also the tandem utilization of two new coding tools: directional spatial prediction for intracoding and variable block size motion compensation of H.264/AVC. Experiments performed using the proposed hybridization method of combining the above spatial and temporal estimation elements fulfilled the expectations of control-whole-scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed method offers excellent gains of up to 10.62 dB compared to that of the Joint Model (JM) decoder for a wide range of benchmark sequences without any considerable increase in time demand.