Lost motion vector recovery algorithm

In motion compensated video coding, if motion vectors are lost or received with errors, not only will the current frame be corrupted, but also the errors will propagate to succeeding frames. The effects of errors can be further magnified by the fact that motion vectors are usually coded differentially. In this paper, we propose a technique using motion vector smoothing in the encoder and both boundary matching and motion vector consistency check in the decoder to compensate for lost or erroneously received motion vectors. The proposed technique produces noticeably better results than those reported previously. And the proposed motion vector smoothing algorithm causes virtually no degradation in the decoded image quality when motion vectors have no errors