Advanced error concealment for 1Seg video communication considering error propagation inside a frame

Transmission of compressed video over error-prone channels may result in packet losses or errors, which can significantly degrade the image quality. Such degradation becomes even worse in 1Seg video broadcasting, which is widely used in Japan and Brazil for mobile phone TV services recently, where errors are drastically increased and the lost areas are contiguous. Therefore, the errors in the earlier concealed MBs (macro blocks) may propagate to the MBs later to be concealed inside the same frame (spatial domain). The error concealment (EC) is used to recover the lost data by the redundancy in videos. Aiming at spatial error propagation (SEP) reduction, this paper proposes an SEP-reduction-based EC (SEPEC). In SEPEC, besides the mismatch distortion in the current MB, the potential propagated mismatch distortion in the following to be concealed MBs is also minimized. Also, two extensions of SEPEC, i.e. SEPEC with refined search and SEPEC with multiple layer match, are discussed. Compared with previous work, the experiments show SEPEC achieves much better performance of video recovery and excellent trade-off between quality and computation in 1Seg broadcasting. (C) 2012 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.