Video Error Correction Using Soft-Output and Hard-Output Maximum Likelihood Decoding Applied to an H.264 Baseline Profile

Error concealment has long been identified as the last line of defense against transmission errors. Since error handling is outside the scope of video coding standards, decoders may choose to simply ignore corrupted packets or attempt to decode their content. In this paper, we present a novel joint source-channel decoding approach that can be applied to received video packets containing transmission errors. Soft-output information is combined with our novel syntax-element-level maximum likelihood decoding framework to effectively extract valid macroblocks from corrupted H.264 slices. Simulation results show that our video error correction strategy provides an average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement near 2 dB compared to the error concealment approach used by the H.264 reference software, as well as an average PSNR improvement of 0.8 dB compared to state-of-the-art error concealment. The proposed method is also applicable when only hard-information is available, in which case it performs better than state-of-the-art error concealment especially in high error conditions. Finally, in our simulations, the proposed method increased the decoder computational complexity by only 5% to 20%, making it applicable for real-time applications.