Enhanced Backward Error Concealment for H.264/AVC Videos on Error-Prone Networks

Transmitting compressed video data is quite common over wireless and wired networks. In error-prone networks, however, packet loss can lead to incorrect decoding. With the new generation standard, H.264/AVC, such issues are prevalent and drastically degrade the quality of decoded video. To solve these problems, error concealment is applied in the decoder. However, traditional error concealment does not give satisfactory results in all cases, and can result in whole frame loss. This issue is addressed by backward error concealment that conceals corrupted frames by using succeeding frames that have been correctly received. This backward error concealment efficiently conceals most of the corrupted pixels, however, it excludes the unreferenced pixels. In this paper, we propose an enhanced backward error concealment method. Based on the continuity of moving objects, the proposed method provides estimated motion vectors to conceal unreferenced pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance in terms of distortions.