Fading Techniques for Error Concealment in Block-Based Video Decoding Systems

Error concealment has a great importance within block-based video decoding systems especially for mobile transmission systems like DVB-T or DVB-H. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal and spatio-bi-temporal fading technique for recovering lost or erroneously received macroblock samples. For spatio-temporal fading based on a boundary error criterion obtained from temporal error concealment, either spatial, temporal, or fading of both methods is used for recovering lost image samples in one macroblock. A weighted absolute difference between well received macroblock boundary samples from the current frame and motion compensated macroblock boundary samples from the previous frame represents the boundary error. The weights for fading are interpolated from the boundary error. For spatio-bi-temporal fading, one lost macroblock can individually be recovered pel-wise spatially from the current or bi-temporally from the previous and the future frame by weighted averaging three different estimations for the lost macroblock. The simulation results have shown that for concealing erroneously received uncompressed and compressed video data the proposed methods outperform the reference methods both in subjective and objective video quality