MPEG-4 video error detection by using data hiding techniques

Two major congenital limitations in wireless transmission are its narrow channel bandwidth and high noise characteristic. Hence, multimedia data are compressed to conform to the channel bandwidth, but on the other hand also suffer from less immunity from channel noise. Many researches have focused on video error resilience and error concealment techniques to improve received quality in presence of high channel noise. However, they often assumed that video errors have been correctly located. If not, error concealment can not be properly applied. In this paper, we propose using data hiding techniques to embed useful information (e.g., the types of MV-related data in MPEG-4 data-partitioned packet) at encoder so that real errors can be detected by consistency-checking after this information is extracted at decode side. This helps the application of error concealment to improve video quality. Experiments show that our proposed equally-spaced-check-point (ESCP) error detection scheme can detect 70% of bit errors that can not be detected traditionally.