Variable block size error concealment scheme based on H.264/AVC non-normative decoder

As the newest video coding standard, H.264/AVC can achieve high compression efficiency. At the same time, due to the high-efficiently predictive coding and the variable length entropy coding, it is more sensitive to transmission errors. So error concealment (EC) in H.264 is very important when compressed video sequences are transmitted over error-prone networks and erroneously received. To achieve higher EC performance, this paper proposes variable block size error concealment scheme (VBSEC) by utilizing the new concept of variable block size motion estimation (VBSME) in H.264 standard. This scheme provides four EC modes and four sub-block partitions. The whole corrupted macro-block (MB) will be divided into variable block size adaptively according to the actual motion. More precise motion vectors (MV) will be predicted for each sub-block. We also produce a more accurate distortion function based on spatio-temporal boundary matching algorithm (STBMA). By utilizing VBSEC scheme based on our STBMA distortion function, we can reconstruct the corrupted MB in the inter frame more accurately. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme can obtain maximum PSNR gain up to 1.72 dB and 0.48 dB, respectively compared with the boundary matching algorithm (BMA) adopted in the JM11.0 reference software and STBMA.