An Improved Spatial Error Concealment Algorithm Based on H.264

The losses of packets are inevitable when the video is transported over error-prone networks. Error concealment methods can reduce the quality degradation of the received video by masking the effects of such errors. This paper presents a novel spatial error concealment algorithm based on the directional entropy in the available neighboring Macro Blocks (MBs), which can adaptively switch between weighted pixel average (WPA) adopted in H.264 and an improved directional interpolation algorithm to recover the lost MBs. In this work, the proposed algorithm was evaluated on H.264 reference software JM8.6. The illustrative examples demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better Peak to Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) performance and visual quality, compared with WPA and the conventional directional interpolation algorithm respectively.