A maximum likelihood approach to correcting transmission errors for joint source-channel decoding of H.264 coded video

Real time video applications need to handle transmission errors, as retransmissions are impractical. In this paper, we present a novel joint source channel decoding approach for video error correction. Soft-output information is combined with our syntax element-level maximum likelihood framework to effectively extract valid macroblocks from corrupted H.264 slices. Simulation results show that our video error correction strategy provides better visual quality by reducing the size of the concealment region. Our observations indicate an average PSNR improvement of 0.8 dB (QP=36), with peaks above 10 dB, over state-of-the-art error concealment at a bit error rate of 10^-3.