Hybrid error concealments based on block content

We present a novel error-concealment method for MPEG-2 video decoders. Imperfect transmission of block-based compressed images may result in the loss of blocks, degrading the quality of the received video signal. Since an I-picture is used as a reference picture for forward and backward predictions of neighbouring pictures, transmission errors in an I-picture are propagated both spatially in the I-picture and temporally to P-/B-pictures, and thus may severely degrade the video signal, compared with the errors in P-/B-pictures. To minimise the quality degradation of the video signal, error concealment has been performed in I-pictures through adaptive spatial and temporal interpolations in the respective domains. Using edge information extracted from the neighbourhoods of the erroneous macroblocks, we categorise each erroneous macroblock (MB) based on the characteristics of neighbouring MBs. The categorised MB is reconstructed by the spatial or temporal error concealment methods selected by the category-dependent criteria reflecting the properties of the block content. The proposed technique solves blocky artefacts and blurring problems of existing error concealment methods and thus effectively conceals the lost blocks in an error video signal. Through computer simulations on damaged images, we show that the proposed method is robust to image characteristics and obtains better subjective quality than other error concealment methods.