Saliency-Cognizant Error Concealment in Loss-Corrupted Streaming Video

Error concealment in packet-loss-corrupted streaming video is inherently an under-determined problem, as there are insufficient number of well-defined criteria to recover the missing blocks perfectly. When a Region-of-Interest (ROI) based unequal error protection (UEP) scheme is deployed during video streaming-i.e., more visually salient regions are strongly protected-a lost block is likely to be of low saliency in the original frame. In this paper, we propose to add a low-saliency prior to the error concealment problem as a regularization term. It serves two purposes. First, in ROI-based UEP video streaming, low-saliency prior provides the right side information for the client to identify the correct replacement blocks for concealment. Second, in the event that a perfectly matched block cannot be unambiguously identified, the low-saliency prior reduces viewer´s visual attention on the loss-stricken region, resulting in higher overall subjective quality. We study the effectiveness of a low-saliency prior in the context of a previously proposed RECAP [1] error concealment system. RECAP transmits a low-resolution (LR) version of an image alongside the original high-resolution (HR) version, so that if blocks in the HR version are lost, the correctly-received LR version can serve as a template for matching of suitable replacement blocks from a previously correctly-decoded HR frame. We add a low-saliency prior to the block identification process, so that only replacement candidate blocks with good match and low saliency can be selected. Further, we design and apply four saliency reduction operators iteratively in a loop, in order to reduce the saliency of candidate blocks. Experimental results show that: i) PSNR of the error-concealed frames can be increased dramatically (up to 3.2dB over the original RECAP), showing the effectiveness of a low-saliency prior in the underdetermined error concealment problem; and ii) subjective quality of the repaired video using our proposal, as confirmed by an extensive user study, is better than the original RECAP.