Open Access Research Article

New Hybrid Error Concealment for Digital Compressed Video

Ofer Hadar1*, Merav Huber2, Revital Huber2 and Shlomo Greenberg1

Author Affiliations

1 Communication Systems Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel

2 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2005, 2005:347905  doi:10.1155/ASP.2005.1821


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2005/12/347905


Received: 2 August 2004
Revisions received: 26 December 2004
Published: 28 July 2005

© 2005 Hadar et al.

Transmission of a compressed video signal over a lossy communication network exposes the information to losses and errors, which leads to significant visible errors in the reconstructed frames at the decoder side. In this paper we present a new hybrid error concealment algorithm for compressed video sequences, based on temporal and spatial concealment methods. We describe spatial and temporal techniques for the recovery of lost blocks. In particular, we develop postprocessing techniques for the reconstruction of missing or damaged macroblocks. A new decision support tree is developed to efficiently choose the best appropriate error concealment method, according to the spatial and temporal characteristics of the sequence. The proposed algorithm is compared to three error concealment methods: spatial, temporal, and a previous hybrid approach using different noise levels. The results are evaluated using four quality measures. We show that our error concealment scheme outperforms all the other three methods for all the tested video sequences.

Keywords:
error concealment; spatial/temporal/hybrid error concealment; video coding; MPEG-2; decision tree; multimedia/video communication

Research Article